The Game: Corner Canyon at Davis
Corner Canyon at Davis (Kaysville). Friday, Aug. 14, 7 p.m. MT. SPIN Utah No. 1 at SPIN Utah No. 5. Casey Sutera's first game as head coach.
There's a trophy case in Draper, Utah, that has run out of polite ways to say "again."
Three straight 6A championships live in it now. The newest one arrived in November, a 35-20 win over Lone Peak that finished the three-peat, and it barely had time to collect dust before the man who coached it out the door left for a college sideline.
Eric Kjar is at Weber State now. In most programs, that's the moment the music stops. The star coach leaves, the transfer rumors start, and the dynasty becomes a documentary.
Corner Canyon went another way.
In January the Chargers handed the keys to Casey Sutera, and if that name sounds familiar to anyone who watched this program grow up, it should. Sutera ran Corner Canyon's defense from 2017 to 2021. Three of the rings in that crowded trophy case, the 2018 through 2020 batch, got sized during his time on staff.
He left to run his own program at Brighton, won 35 games in four seasons there, and now he's back in the building he helped construct. This isn't a stranger inheriting a dynasty. It's a co-author coming home to finish the book.
Casey Sutera's First Game Is Three Days Out
The book opens Friday.
Corner Canyon starts the Sutera era on the road at Davis, the Darts of Kaysville, at 7 p.m. It is the first game on our August board by six full days, which means the loudest argument of the Utah preseason gets its first evidence before most of the country has finished stretching.
It is not a soft landing, either. Davis sits fifth on our Utah high school football board. A new head coach, an offense that graduated every point it scored from the state semifinals on, a road stadium, a top-five in-state opponent. One August night, four hard questions.
The Honest Math on What Corner Canyon Lost
The inheritance comes with real holes, so let's do the honest math. All six Chargers who made the Deseret News 6A first team are gone, and these weren't just guys. These were dudes, the kind with next-level starter stamped on the film.
Helaman Casuga, the Polynesian Player of the Year, took his 3,487 passing yards to Texas A&M. Esun Tafa, a Sporting News third team All-American and a SPIN All-American, spent the fall eating premier edge rushers for lunch from Draper to Pembroke Pines to Baltimore. SPIN names one All-American team, not three, so that second honor is a first team by definition. He's already in the weight room at USC.
Weston Briggs, a 6-foot-2, 205-pound bruiser with 10.9 speed in the hundred, closed his career by gashing Lone Peak for 170 yards and four touchdowns in the title game, then signed on to follow his old coach to Weber State. Briggs is one of the most underrated players we have ever put on film, a back with the size and the speed you expect to see carrying the ball on Sundays.
The list keeps going, which is the point. Kai Meza, one of the state's most electric receivers and the man for the big catch whenever the Chargers needed one most, torched IMG for a touchdown in the famous 35-34 takedown as a junior. He set the tone for the whole season on the opener's first play from scrimmage, a 96-yard catch and run. Three weeks later Liberty (Peoria, Ariz.) brought the stingiest defense among Arizona's Open Division contenders into Draper, tried to handle him down the middle, and watched him break their spirit early in the third quarter with an 80-yard touchdown that put the rout on. He's at Cal now, and we expect him on the field early.
Jayden Pearce, who our film room simply calls Mr. Nasty, graduated off the edge too. The nickname was earned the honest way: 10 sacks, three forced fumbles, a first team all-state season, and one October night against American Fork where he piled up 14 tackles and dropped the quarterback twice. Only one player in all of 6A got to the quarterback more often. That production walked out the door with everything else.
And Joaquin Rodriguez, the other SPIN All-American, closed his career like a heist movie.
In the semifinal he took Mountain Ridge's BYU-bound Tytan DeJong out of the game entirely: two interceptions, 106 return yards, one taken back for a touchdown, four more passes swatted away. In the final he shadowed Lone Peak's Kennan Pula and filled the stat sheet sideways, nine tackles, seven of them solo, two breakups, a textbook coverage sack, and a touchdown-saving solo stop on third and goal in the fourth quarter with the three-peat hanging in the balance.
Then came Baltimore. Against St. Frances, on a field crawling with future Sunday players, the best defensive player out there wore a Chargers helmet. A pick, a sack, a tackle for loss, two breakups, four stops.
Three games. Three assignments. Three clamp jobs. He's doing mission work for his church while he decides where he'll play college ball in 2027. We hear the likely answer is a reunion with Coach Kjar at Weber State, though nothing is confirmed yet.
A quarterback, a tailback, a receiver, a tackle, an edge and a corner. Two All-Americans. Six first team all-state. All out the door.
And that's just the first team. Jesean Mayberry is gone. Isaiah Morris, gone. Mason Hamilton and Mason Wood, gone. Scottie Pepper and Lucas Jackson, gone too. So is Bronson Evans, the beloved backup who quarterbacked the Chargers to the 2024 crown.
Sit with this one: Corner Canyon lost every single yard of offensive production from the championship game. Every point it scored from the state semifinals on walked across a graduation stage.
The offense isn't retooling. It's re-auditioning.
Diesel Dart Didn't Arrive in a Moving Van
Here's what makes this handoff different from the usual champion-in-transition story: the answer didn't arrive in a moving van. Corner Canyon's next centerpiece is a Utah legacy carrying the most famous last name in state football.
Diesel Dart, Jaxson's little brother and the son of a former Ute, committed to Utah in June with Michigan, Ole Miss and Auburn still on the line. He anchors the secondary at free safety and moonlights at receiver, 49 tackles and two picks on one side of the ball last fall, 131 yards and a touchdown on the other.
And here's the detail that should make the rest of 6A nervous.
Dart spends his offseasons at Peak Athlete with Robertson Daniel, the former BYU corner who lasted nine years in professional football and owns a Grey Cup ring. Utah calls him the DB Whisperer, and the name is really just a headcount. The best defensive backs in this state train with him regardless of level, high schoolers and college starters and NFL guys home for the offseason, all grinding the same drills in the same gym. Daniel is the trainer who rebuilt Joaquin Rodriguez's footwork and pad level last offseason, the tune-up that paid off all the way through those December clamp jobs. And before Rodriguez left, he did the secondary one last favor: he recruited Dart to go train with Daniel himself.
The old cornerstone walked the new one into the building.
This summer the rebuild belongs to Dart, footwork and technical game, brick by brick. He opens the year on the SPIN All-American Watch List. Around him, five defensive starters return, including fellow watch list corner Josh Harris and Mr. Energy himself, Tate Patterson. The offense will be greener, and Sutera knows it. But this is a homegrown core, not an imported one, and in the transfer era that might be the most Corner Canyon thing about the whole roster.
The rest of the country reads that same graduation list and lands somewhere very different. MaxPreps has Corner Canyon 48th in its preseason national rankings. HSFA has them 50th.
Fifty.
And let's be fair about it: the doubt earned its way here. Everything above, the exodus, the new coach, an offense starting from scratch, is the exact case for 48th. Feed this roster into a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet blinks.
But this program has spent nine years turning that spreadsheet into confetti. Corner Canyon graduated "irreplaceable" classes over and over in the Kjar era and went 112-10 anyway. Five defensive starters are back. The next centerpiece got walked into the trainer's building by the last one. The head coach poured the foundation himself.
So our board has them 14th in America, and we didn't get there on sentiment. We got there on one September night: Corner Canyon 45, Liberty (Peoria, Ariz.) 14.
Sit with what that scoreline means. Liberty was arguably the second-best team in Arizona last fall. The Lions went 10-2, and the loss that wasn't Corner Canyon took a goal-line stand from eventual Open Division champion Basha to land, 19-16, in the semifinals. Four downs inside the five. Basha jumped offside three times keeping the sequence alive and still got the stop, on a fourth-down fumble. Outside that night in Draper, nobody got past 23 on that defense all season.
The Chargers scored 45. Won by 31. In early September, in the middle of a title defense. Whatever the gap was between Utah's best and Arizona's elite last fall, that night it wasn't a field goal. It was a canyon.
At some point a dynasty earns the right to be doubted only after it loses. That point in Draper was about two titles ago.
This is not a program that needs your benefit of the doubt. It has spent a decade paying for it in advance.
Even Utah is hedging, which is the fun part. The Deseret News coaches poll still has Corner Canyon first in 6A, but the first-place votes scattered this summer, with Lone Peak, Skyridge and Friday's opponent each collecting their own believers.
Don't discount Davis. The Darts landed fourth in that poll and could just as easily have come out second, and at least one coach in the room went ahead and put them first. That ballot is not the crazy one. Davis brings back a load of talent, including the reigning 6A Player of the Year and maybe the best player in the state, Bode Sparrow.
Which is the whole trouble with a poll in August, national or local. The country can't decide whether Corner Canyon is 14th or 50th. Utah can't decide whether Davis is first or fourth. Everybody is looking at the same rosters and arriving somewhere different, because nobody has played anybody yet.
Friday, somebody does.
Lone Peak, remember, is the team that stood on the other sideline in November and watched the confetti fall. We put the Knights 21st in the country ourselves. HSFA says 116th. On3's composite says 102nd. Nobody's top 100 has them anywhere.
That's not homer math either. Lone Peak has beaten Corner Canyon in the regular season two years running, 28-21 in 2024 and 42-21 last September, a night the Knights forced five turnovers. They led at halftime of both state title games too. The dynasty survived because the Chargers won the second half. Twice.
Which cuts both ways, if you're keeping score at home. It means the three-peat ran through a legitimate national-caliber team in back-to-back Novembers. And it means the country is about to get a look for itself: IMG and Bishop Gorman both visit Highland this fall. If the Knights take one of those, the poll industry owes the entire state an apology. If those games are simply close, that alone tells the country what Utah already knows.
The gap at the top of Utah is closing. Everyone in the state can feel it. And every inch of it makes the team holding the trophy harder to doubt.
Baltimore Raised the Ceiling
And the map got bigger in December. The Chargers took the country's premier offense to Baltimore for the first-ever Overtime Nationals championship and ran into St. Frances, 37-20.
A loss, sure. Also a preview.
That event is reportedly working toward a four-team national playoff, which means the mountain this program is climbing no longer tops out at Rice-Eccles Stadium. The dynasty question and the national question are about to become the same question.
So the season on the hill arrives with it stitched into every practice jersey: was it the driver, or was it the car?
And let's be clear about what walked out the door, because "brilliant" undersells it. Kjar went 112-10 in nine seasons in Draper. Six state championships. A 48-game winning streak that still stands as the state record. He won a title at Jordan back in 2012, before anybody outside the valley knew his name.
If they ever carve a Mount Rushmore of high school football coaches, his face goes on the mountain and the argument is about the other three. Weber State didn't hire a coach so much as annex a monument.
Which is exactly why this season matters beyond the trophy case. Dynasties that survive losing a face on the mountain are the ones built on something underneath the play sheet, on weight rooms and feeder programs and a culture where the front seven blocks out the noise and the sun. Sutera knows what's underneath this one. He poured some of the foundation himself.
And the calendar puts a date on the bigger question. September 4, in Peoria, the Chargers walk into Liberty's building for the rematch the Lions have wanted since the 45-14. Same night in Henderson, the other Liberty, the Nevada one, hosts Skyridge. Print the city every time this fall.
Utah football versus Arizona football, on Arizona grass this time.
But that is a month away, and Friday is not.
The Chargers carry the state flag until somebody takes it from them. Davis gets the first swing at it Friday night in Kaysville, against a program that has forgotten how to hand things over.
Either way, the trophy case has room. It always does. Come November, we'll find out if "again" is still in the vocabulary.
