Last week, Dallas-area UIL football teams played 20 second-round playoff games against teams from outside of D-FW.
Local teams won 17 of those, with the average margin of victory in those games being 31.4 points. Six of the wins were by more than 40.
Playing at neutral sites in almost every case, Dallas-area teams crushed opponents from all parts of the state, from San Angelo to El Paso to Abilene to Lubbock, to Midland to Amarillo and from the Austin area. Southlake Carroll, ranked No. 1 in the state and No. 9 nationally by MaxPreps, had the most emphatic victory with a 72-7 rout of San Angelo Central and Denton Ryan was nearly as dominant with a 59-0 win against Abilene High, which finished the regular season ranked No. 10 in the state.
Only four D-FW teams won by fewer than 21 points, with Anna’s 38-35 win over Amarillo Palo Duro being the closest. Forney beat Killeen Harker Heights 48-44 thanks to 301 yards rushing and five touchdowns from four-star Notre Dame pledge Javian Osborne, Midlothian Heritage beat state-ranked Texarkana Texas High 42-38 and Frisco Wakeland rallied from a 16-0 deficit and beat Cedar Park 43-36.
High School Sports
Dallas-area teams have usually overwhelmed out-of-area opponents in the first four rounds of the playoffs, and last year, D-FW had seven of the eight state semifinalists from Region I and Region II in the top four playoff brackets — 6A Division I, 6A Division II, 5A Division I and 5A Division II. The only exception was Longview, which beat DeSoto in the 6A Division II Region II final, and DeSoto got its revenge by clobbering Longview 60-28 in the second round this year.
D-FW’s dominance was even more pronounced in 2023, as all eight of those state semifinalists were local teams, and the Dallas area had seven of the eight semifinalists in 2022. Longview is the only non-D-FW team to make the state semifinals out of Region I or Region II in the UIL’s top four playoff brackets the last three years, and Dallas-area teams have won the Region I and Region II titles in 6A Division I the last seven years.
In that seven-year span, Duncanville has reached at least the state semifinals every year and is 13-0 against non-local teams through the first four rounds of the playoffs, with the average margin of victory being 38.5 points. North Crowley, the defending 6A Division I state champion, has won its last five playoff games against out-of-area teams, including last year’s 72-14 rout of six-time state champion Odessa Permian in the second round and a 50-21 win over four-time state champion Austin Westlake in the state championship game.
State finals are the one place where D-FW teams have been challenged by the state’s best, with local teams going 2-3 in championship games last year and 17-12 since 2018. Galena Park North Shore is responsible for three of those losses, beating Duncanville in the 6A Division I state title games in 2018, 2019 and 2021, but Duncanville got its revenge with wins over North Shore in the 2022 and 2023 championship games.
Duncanville was part of a local sweep of the top four state titles in 2022, with DeSoto, Aledo and South Oak Cliff also claiming titles. Those same four schools made it back to state championship games in 2023, with all but South Oak Cliff winning.
Find more high school sports coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.