The Mountain Ridge Overreaction Is Actually Just a Reaction

Mountain Ridge trailed by 14 in its own stadium Thursday night, in front of a crowd that had already waited out an hour of lightning to get there, and everybody in Herriman was running the same grim math. Skyridge did this a year ago. Skyridge was doing it again.

Then the Sentinels outscored the Falcons 35-6 the rest of the way.

Final: Mountain Ridge 41, Skyridge 26. Our Utah No. 6 just took down our Utah No. 4 in the first game either of them played, and the first game anywhere that put two teams from our board on the same field.

Mountain Ridge's Offense Is Built to Live This Way

The first half looked like a problem. Most of it was just the bill coming due on how this team plays.

Mountain Ridge runs up-tempo spread with air raid bones, and that style charges you for what it gives you. You take the shot on first down, so you live in third-and-eight. Your spacing is the whole offense, so the red zone squeezes it flat. Clock management is not the point of the operation and never has been, and Jaxon Hunt didn't throw for 4,061 yards last season by burning three minutes a possession.

Then there's the part nobody puts on the highlight reel. When those drives don't convert, your defense is back on the grass ninety seconds later, and then again, and again. That was the first half in Herriman. The Sentinels couldn't string possessions together, the six points on the board came off the foot instead of the end zone, and their defense played most of the second quarter on tired legs. There was wind left over from the storm, and Hunt sailed a couple of early shots to receivers who had already beaten the coverage.

Skyridge took what was offered. Junior Jagger Fountaine, making his first varsity start, threw two touchdowns and ran for a third, and the Falcons led 20-6 with 4:46 left in the half. The home sideline went quiet. The student section went quieter.

Xander Thayer Went 82 Yards and the Stadium Came With Him

Next possession, third-and-12, because of course it was. Pressure in Hunt's face. He threw it up.

It went into double coverage for Thayer, which is the kind of decision that gets a quarterback benched roughly 90 percent of the time. The senior came down with it. The two Skyridge defenders came down with each other. Thayer went 82 yards without anybody laying a hand on him, and the place that had gone quiet ten minutes earlier came back all at once.

20-13 at the break, and Mountain Ridge still left points out there. A drive inside the five in the final seconds of the half ended with an interception in the end zone. An earlier red-zone trip died on a fourth-and-two. Both of those are the same tax, paid twice.

"It's kind of funny because throughout the summer, we kind of struggled in the red zone against our defense," coach Nick Robins told the Deseret News. "We gotta do a better job of emphasizing the red zone in practice."

Bradley Foster's Welcome to Varsity

The second half wasn't a philosophy change. It was a run game.

Foster expected to split carries. Taniela Kinikini went out on the opening series and didn't come back, and the whole load landed on a junior who spent last fall developing on the JV field. That's the part worth sitting with. The season's first emergency arrived five minutes into the season, and Mountain Ridge already had the answer in the building, because that's what good programs do. They grow them at home and they're ready when the door opens.

Foster kicked his down. Twenty-nine carries, 216 yards, a coming out party thrown at Skyridge's expense. The thing about a bowling ball is that it doesn't get lighter in the fourth quarter. The Falcons tackled him fine at 8 p.m. By 10 they were tackling him with one arm and hoping.

And once he started moving it, everything upstream of him changed. Drives lived. First downs came in twos and threes. The defense that spent the first half sprinting back onto the field got to sit down, drink something, and watch football for a while, which is a luxury this offense doesn't usually hand them.

Foster's two-yard touchdown catch early in the third tied it 20-20. His 17-yard run around the edge with 5:13 left ended it.

Both of those scores came after Skyridge bad snaps and muffed punts, which handed Mountain Ridge the ball at the Skyridge 33 and the Skyridge 22. In a 15-point game, that's two plays that weren't even plays.

"We've always known Bradley Foster is a dude, right? He was a JV last year and he was awesome," Robins told the Deseret News. "We knew what we had, and I'm just so proud of him and the way he ran the ball."

Tytan DeJong Is the Reason Everybody Else Was Open

The best player on the field committed to BYU in March, and he played like it.

DeJong is Mountain Ridge's senior tight end, a Deseret News First Team All-State pick as a junior with more than 1,000 receiving yards, and the first commitment BYU landed in the 2027 class. He picked the Cougars over Michigan, Utah, Cal, Stanford and a stack of others. He's 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds and he catches everything inside a radius that has no business being that wide. Thursday he got to open grass in a hurry and broke tackles from defensive backs who arrived with the correct angle and the wrong amount of body weight.

The bigger thing was what he did to Skyridge's plan. When a defense has to know where a kid is on every snap, it stops being able to worry about everybody else, and Mountain Ridge spent the second half attacking everybody else. Hunt was exactly what the preseason said he'd be, 269 yards and four touchdowns, working the intermediate stuff over the middle and dropping the deep ball in at a rate you don't usually see on a windy August night.

The Mountain Ridge Front Seven Was the Real Surprise

Everybody knew about DeJong and Hunt. Nobody was talking about this defensive front, and it was the most interesting group on the field.

Skyridge could not run between the tackles. Not early, not late, not when it needed four yards to keep the ball away from Foster. That's a problem for a Region 3 contender in August and a bigger one in November, and it's the first thing on the Falcons' fix list.

Give the Sentinels this too: they surrendered three scores in about a quarter and a half, on a night their own offense kept sending them right back out, and then gave up six points the rest of the way. Six. In a game they were losing by 14.

Skyridge Has One Easy Fix and One Hard One

Nobody should be writing obituaries in Lehi. Start with the thing that actually decided this game, because it's also the most fixable thing in football: two bad snaps, two muffed punts, two short fields, two touchdowns. Skyridge didn't get beaten there. It handed the game over. That's a week of reps and a coaching point, not a flaw in the roster.

The harder part is that this is a different football team than last year's, and Thursday it didn't always look like the plan had caught up to that. Skyridge replaced a quarterback who's now on Colorado's roster. Kaneal Sweetwyne made you account for a run on every single snap, and an offense built on that threat doesn't automatically transfer to the next guy.

We're high on Fountaine. He's accurate, he's comfortable throwing from the pocket, and there's a version of this where he's the more complete quarterback by November. He's just a different set of strengths, and he's also in his first year as a starter, which showed. On a fourth down inside the red zone in the final minutes, with Skyridge still needing a score, it looked from the stands like he had a lane to run it in. He threw it instead. The defender got a hand on it, and that was the game. The receiver on that route probably wants it back too, because working to the back corner would have opened up more grass and forced that defender into a much harder choice.

Every young quarterback banks a handful of those in August. The ones who are any good spend it once.

The defense is the real project. This group didn't look like the one that made Skyridge miserable to play last fall, and the secondary is where it showed. Mountain Ridge got behind that coverage more than once, on the same side of the field, with a safety and a corner who never looked like they'd agreed on who had what. And giving up 216 yards to one back is not a communication issue. That's a front that got moved.

Here's what gets lost in a 15-point final: this game was closer than 41-26 reads. Two special teams disasters were worth two touchdowns of field position. Fix those and Skyridge is in it at the end. It's a long season, and Week 1 is a lousy place to decide who anybody is.

The Mountain Ridge Overreaction, Priced Honestly

Which cuts the other way too, and here's where somebody tells me it's one game in August and I should sit down. Fine. One game in August is also the only evidence anybody has, and this one said something specific: we had Mountain Ridge sixth. We said out loud when we locked the board that they might be the team we had light. They were the team we had light.

Region 2 just beat a good Region 3 team by 15, with a back in his first varsity workload carrying it 29 times, a BYU commit bending the coverage, and a defensive front nobody had scouted. The Sentinels open 1-0 with a win over a top-five Utah team on our own board, and the board answers for that in this week's update.

Hats off to Robins and that program. They took the worst night of their season last August and turned it into the best night of this one, against the team that handed them the first one.

Bookmark it. Nobody's calling Mountain Ridge sixth-best in Utah by October.

Header photo: Zero Boundary Media.