Southlake Carroll trailed Jenks 27-0 at halftime of its opener and won 34-33. Eight days later it went to Fort Worth and lost to North Crowley 40-10.
One of those is the team. Allen shows up Friday to find out which.
Kickoff is 7:00 at Dragon Stadium. We have Allen ninth and Carroll 60th, and 51 places is a lot of daylight for a game on a Friday night in September.
Allen has already done the hard part of its schedule
The Eagles opened by beating Duncanville 26-7. That is our No. 35, and Allen's defense had eight sacks and 13 tackles for loss and held the Panthers to 163 yards.
Then they beat DeSoto 50-6 and led 50-0 after three quarters.
Two of the three programs that have defined Dallas-area football for a decade, beaten by a combined 63 points, in back-to-back weeks, at home. Allen coach Lee Wiginton was not interested in a victory lap after the first one, telling Allen ISD:
"We're not naive. We know that Duncanville will be a whole lot better when they're deeper in the season. We just hope that we are too."
He also said the quiet thing about why the opener mattered: "They eliminated us from the playoffs last year."
The sophomores are running Allen's offense
Ty Snell is a sophomore quarterback with six touchdown passes and a 71 percent completion rate. Against DeSoto he threw for 170 and four scores.
Zach Williams is a sophomore receiver averaging 84 yards a game with four touchdowns, and he had 100 yards and three scores in that DeSoto game by himself.
A tenth-grade quarterback throwing to a tenth-grade receiver, on a team that just beat the reigning 6A Division II champion by 44. That is either the most fun thing in Texas or the reason Allen has a ceiling this year, and nobody will know which until November.
Beckhem Parker, a senior lineman, had three sacks and five tackles for loss in the opener. Jeremiah Storey, a senior defensive back, has two interceptions.
Carroll's problem is that both of its games were real
Here is the thing about the 40-10 loss. It came at North Crowley, which is our No. 17, on the road. That is not a disqualifying result. Losing by 30 to a top-20 team is a bad night, not a bad team.
And the Jenks comeback was genuinely absurd. Junior quarterback Hudson Tomcheck threw for 322 yards and two touchdowns at the Cotton Bowl and ran in the winner from three yards out with 2:09 left, after his team spent a half doing nothing at all.
Brody Knowles, a senior, caught seven of those passes for 180 yards and two scores. He is averaging 112 receiving yards a game. Blake Gunter, another senior, is at 104.
Two senior receivers over a hundred yards a game each. Whoever Allen has covering them had better be a junior with a future.
Lee Munn is two games into the job
Carroll promoted its defensive coordinator in February. Munn had been on that staff since 2018, and he inherited a program that reached the regional final last December and put 51 on Denton Guyer to get there.
His first win was the Jenks comeback. His second game was the worst Carroll loss in years. That is a strange first fortnight.
They are not actually rivals
Worth saying, because the schedule makes it look like one. Allen and Southlake Carroll do not play every year. The Dallas Morning News counted it in 2021: back-to-back season openers in 2012 and 2013, both won by Allen, then nothing for eight years until the 2021 regional final, which Carroll won 47-21.
That is three meetings in 14 years and each one arrived with something attached. This is the fourth.
Allen has not been behind in the second half this season. Carroll has trailed by 27 and led by nothing. Friday is where those two facts meet.
Reporting drawn from the Dallas Morning News, Allen ISD, Southlake Style, Dragon Sports Network, Dave Campbell's Texas Football, 247Sports and MaxPreps.
