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AF_Puma | Friday, March 2, 2007, 2:59 pm
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By Jim Vallen
COUGARBLUE
Mesa, Arizona’s Mountain View 5A High School has a tradition of producing champions. There's a reason BYU fans should hope it continues.
Since the school began operation in 1976, it has logged eight state football championships in 1978, 1983, 1986, 1993, 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2002 with five runner-up years in 1987, 1988, 1992, 2003 and last year in 2006. That’s a first or second place finish IN THE STATE (not just their conference) 43% of the years they have been in competition.
You might call that being successful—maybe even magical.
It probably wouldn’t surprise you then if you were to find out that they have also produced some NFL talent as well in the likes of Baltimore Ravens Pro Bowler Todd Heap; former San Francisco 49er and BYU Cougar, Todd Shell; and former St. Louis Ram/Kansas City Chief and current starting quarterback for Utah’s AFL team, the Utah Blaze—Joe Germaine.
Based on the power of having recorded 42 state championships in all high school sports in the state of Arizona, Sports Illustrated named Mountain View in 2005 to their Top 25 High School Athletic Programs in the Nation list.
So why would the school’s success be important to a BYU fan?
Mountain View has become very well known to Cougar fans of late as it produced the 2006 Mountain West Conference (MWC) Offensive Player of the Year—BYU’s own John Beck.
The BYU connection doesn’t end there.
The quarterback projected by many BYU fans and sports wrtiters to be the heir apparent to John Beck is also a graduate of Mountain View and was an eighth-grader when Beck was a senior who was leading his Toro’s to their conquest of their opponents and claim to the 1999 Arizona 5A State Championship.
Enter Max Hall.
What Cougar fans want to know though is if he’ll be anywhere near as good as John Beck proved out to be because it has been a long time since BYU has ever been in this predicament where there is not one quarterback on the team that has ever taken even one live snap for the team in a real game.
In fact the last time has a very eerie similarity to our situation now.
The last time was in 1995 when Steve Sarkisian came to town. BYU, the year before, led by John Walsh, had posted a 10-3 record highlighted by a 31-6 shellacking of Big 12 powerhouse Oklahoma in the Copper Bowl.
In 2006 we had an 11-2 record and a 38-8 whipping of PAC-10 power Oregon in the Las Vegas Bowl.
That does sound similarly like the same stage is being set.
BYU did end 1995 tied for first, but due to tie breakers, was shut out of a bowl game and ended the season with a 7-4 record.
I don’t think Cougar fans would be very content if we ended 2007 at 8-4.
It’s no wonder then that the prognosticators generally have not yet been kind in projecting much success for the 2007 season and even a local Salt Lake City paper, The Deseret News, has already had an article projecting the Cougars to only do as well as third place in the MWC.
I thought one way I could possibly dispel some of the anxiety of Cougar fans concerning Max Hall would be to look at comparisons of the accomplishments of John Beck and Max Hall while they were in the same environment—Mesa Mountain View High School.
John Beck
Beck played very sparingly as a junior, only mounting a few yards here and there as a backup. It was his senior year that gave him the opportunity to really shine.
Year/Attempts/Completions/Yards/TDs/% complete/Interceptions/Rating
98-JR…51…25…404…1…49.0%…0…122.03
99-SR…214…121…2,669…42…56.5%…4…222.33
The 42 touchdowns in a year set an Arizona state high school football record and the 2,669 yards passing in one year is still the school record.
For his career at Mountain View, John received the following awards:
Outstanding Male Scholar Athlete
First Team All-Region
Region Offensive Player of the Year
First Team All-State
USA Today All-American Honorable Mention
Dairyman First Team All-American
First Team Super All-State
Super All-State Player of the Year
Ed Dougherty and Fred Enke Awards (Arizona Quarterback of the Year)
Arizona All-Star game Most Valuable Player Award
Fox Sports 5A Player of the Year
Max Hall
Hall won out the starting quarterback position in his junior year and led the Toros to a 14-0 record and the 5A State Championship. They were ONLY runners-up his senior year.
Year/Attempts/Completions/Yards/TDs/% complete/Interceptions/Rating
02-JR…213…130…2,384…26…61.0%...9…186.88
03-SR…242…131…2,405…35…54.1%...9…177.90
Max set the school records for career TD passes (61), career passing yards (4,789), average passing yards per game (171), career attempts (455), career completions (262), career all-purpose yards (5,257) and completion percentage 61.0%.
While attending Mountain View, Max received the following accolades and awards:
Junior Year
Second Team All-State
Arizona Republic Second Team All-State
East Valley Tribune 5A Offensive Player of the Year
East Valley Tribune Regional Player of the Year
Ed Dougherty Award finalist (Arizona Quarterback of the Year)
Senior Year
Mountain View High School team Most Valuable Player
Arizona Republic First Team All-State
East Valley Tribune 5A Offensive Player of the Year
East Valley Tribune Regional Player of the Year
East Valley Tribune First Team All-State
Arizona Coaches Association First Team All-State
Phoenix Metro Football Magazine Mesa City Player of the Year
Phoenix Metro Football Magazine First Team All-State
Ed Dougherty Award finalist (Arizona Quarterback of the Year)
Rivals #6 ranked AZ athlete, #26 nationally at QB
Rivals 3-star 5.5 rated player
Super Prep #25 nationally at QB
Tacoma News Tribune “Top Western 100”
What those that know the two have said
The Old Coach
Tom Joseph, the current football head coach at Mountain View, was a relatively new head coach when Hall won the starting quarterback job as a junior. Beck had played under Coach Bernie Busken, who left the high school to coach at Western New Mexico University, a Division II school where he was named head coach last month.
But Tom knows both quarterbacks very well as he said that he would work with Beck during the times that he’d come back to the homestead from school.
I asked him if he thought we’d have much of a drop-off from Beck to Hall. “No”, he said. “Max’s a great young man. He’s very coachable, very competitive, and he’s very much a student of the game, just like John. As you sit with him and watch film he is really quick to pickup important things and learn very quickly.”
“That’s a good blood line that he comes from” Tom Joesph said.
Wilford “Whizzer” White is the grandfather. He was an All-American running back at ASU and later played for the Chicago Bears. He’s the father of Danny White, the Utah Blaze (AFL team) head coach and also a former collegiate All-American and All-Pro NFL quarterback.
“All the Malones, the Whites and the Halls, they’re all related. Even the girls are athletic. They’re all athletic. Max has a younger sister that’s on the cheer squad. There’s been three Hall girls part of that group.”
Wilford “Whizzer” White, Hall’s grandfather, still holds several Mesa Public Schools records 60 years later. He has the career touchdown record (52) and career rushing record (4,307). His grandfather attended Mesa High School, the same one that produced Via Sikahema, a well-known football BYU alumnus.
Teammates
The first team defenders remarked this past season that Max Hall was the best quarterback they faced all season, and this was with a quarterback that only had scout team members to make him look good. Imagine what he’ll be able to do with first-team talent around him next year.
In an interview with Total Blue Sports managing editor, Talo Steves, Bryan Kehl, a soon to be senior defensive linebacker and probably one of the players more likely to step into the leadership shoes of departing Cameron Jensen, said, “Max is no joke, and he’s a stud,” Kehl said. “What I love that he does is he is so confident and he talks trash. Sometimes it’s a little too much, but I would rather have a quarterback that has too much confidence than not enough.”
In that same interview with Steves, Ben Criddle, another future senior defensive leader said, “He’s an incredible player. He’s doing great, and he’s going to be great in the future. He’s going to lead our team to success in the near future.” Ben continued, “He’s got that competitive attitude and he takes it to us, and so everybody’s gotta have that competitive attitude in order to succeed against him. That’s what we want out there.”
Competition
As good as Cade Cooper, the highly rated former Snow College QB, undoubtedly is as the player most likely to challenge Hall for the starting quarterback job, he is at a terrible disadvantage. Hall has a year under his belt with Robert Anae’s offense and has the benefit of familiarity with all of BYU’s returning players on offense. He knows their strengths and weaknesses.
Cooper ran an offense at Snow that took advantage of his quickness, often rolling him out for short passes in contrast to BYU’s straight-drop short pass attack. Cooper won’t be far behind system-wise, but Hall’s understanding of the BYU playbook and of his personnel on offense will give him a big edge in making reads and quick decisions on the field.
Conclusion
It’s hard to say if BYU can achieve the success they had in 2006. John Beck had matured in the system when finally given the same one for two years in a row. He didn’t make many mistakes, but he never had a year to sit back and take in the environment, the coaching styles, to learn the game plan and practice with the scout team without having the weight of having to try to carry the team like Max Hall had last year.
There will be speed bumps along the way, that's for certain, but Hall has followed in the wake of John Beck’s slick jet stream once before and was successful. He’s had the pressure of taking his team to the state championship two years in a row and responded well.
My expectation is probably more hope than belief that he’ll develop quickly and that won't result in any dimished team performance.
Steve Sarkisian, the last BYU QB to take over the helm without any prior year’s experience, had a descent debut in posting a 149.79 QB rating his first season. Such a season would bode well for Max Hall. Sarkisian’s second season though was through the roof as he posted a 173.60 rating and led the 14-1 Cougars to a Top-5 national ranking.
That’s probably more where my expectations with Max Hall are when I take off my Cougar-blue sun glasses that lead me to not want any dropoff, but maybe even improvement as we were not yet perfect.
But alas, unless some magic happens, it will be very, very hard for Max Hall to come close to duplicating in his first year (as a red-shirt sophomore) what John Beck did as a polished senior.
Yet, I’m open to being surprised. Those Cougar-blue sunglasses are back in place.
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