ANNAPOLIS — Fort Hill was seeing red on Saturday and so was Mountain Ridge: In the backfield, at the second level and, in the case of No. 3, flying by on his way to the end zone.
On the rare occasion Fort Hill’s heralded all-senior offensive line didn’t create a lane, Jabril Daniels would make one, or two, or five. The scintillating junior back had a performance for the ages, rushing for five touchdowns and nearly 300 yards in the first half alone.
And, for the eighth time in 10 years, Fort Hill lifted the Class 1A state championship with an utterly dominating performance that saw the top-seeded Sentinels build a 42-7 halftime lead en route to a 45-21 triumph over second-seeded Mountain Ridge at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium.
The title is the 10th in school history for Fort Hill, which upped its winning streak to 21 games.
“These guys worked really hard to get back here,” said Fort Hill head coach Zack Alkire, who won his third state title and is 40-2 at the helm. “I’m really proud of their performance today, and all these guys can walk away in their final year as a state champion.”
And what a performance it was.
Daniels took the opening handoff of the game, broke a tackle and cruised 63 yards to the house, and he added touchdown runs spanning 64, 59, 42 and two yards — all in the first half.
Fort Hill (13-0) didn’t run Daniels after the first series of the second half with the game in hand, and he finished with 301 yards and five scores on 21 totes to pace an offense that out gained Mountain Ridge (11-2), 407-132, when its starting unit was on the field.
“When I get the ball you can’t arm tackle me,” Daniels said with a smile on his face, surrounded by members of his offensive line, which he also credited.
Including Saturday’s rout, Fort Hill outscored its 12 opponents, 386-42 in the first half this year — an average lead of 32.2 to 3.5 entering the halftime locker room.
While many predicted another Fort Hill victory, few saw the first 35 seconds of the game coming.
Following Daniels’ long touchdown just 18 seconds into the game, Mountain Ridge threw a haymaker of its own on its first play. Will Patterson hooked up with Andrew Ketterman for a 73-yard pitch-and-catch that leveled the score at 7-all.
Mountain Ridge then forced a three-and-out — aided by a block in the back that negated a Daniels 67-yard touchdown run — and a 26-yard punt return by Austin Frost and a late hit out of bounds gave the Miners the ball at the Fort Hill 25.
However, the Miners came up inches short on a fourth down play, and Fort Hill scored 35 unanswered points to doom the Miners to a third straight state championship loss.
“Not the day we were hoping for obviously,” Mountain Ridge head coach Ryan Patterson said. “Started out with the opening play from them, and then we turned around and scored and I thought we might be in for a shootout.
“Then we got the ball deep in their territory and were stopped inches short on fourth down. It looked like we never recovered from that.”
Patterson was asked if he considered kicking a field goal with Tyler Cook, who is 4 for 5 on the season, but he believed Mountain Ridge would need a touchdown on that series to win the game.
Fort Hill, which led 21-7 after the first quarter on three Daniels scores, had one first-half touchdown that wasn’t via Daniels — a 38-yard scamper by Tristan Ross that made it 35-7.
Mountain Ridge’s hopes at a comeback were put to rest on the final play of the half when Daniels took the handoff out of the Wing-T and scored on a 59-yard carry at the buzzer to ensure the second half would begin with a running clock.
The Miners scored twice in the fourth quarter against the Sentinels’ second unit, doing so with a 33-yard Frost carry for a score and a one-yard touchdown run by Garrett Michaels.
Cooper Silber, who was 6 for 6 on PATs, drilled a 29-yard field goal to close out the Fort Hill scoring with 5:41 to play.
Fort Hill’s first string defense held Mountain Ridge to just 59 yards on 26 plays (2.3 yards per play) after the Miners’ long pass on their first play, with the likes of Carter Hess, Silber, Jaylan Atkinson and Bryson Metz flying to the football.
Gamil Daniels, Jabril’s brother, intercepted a pass, and Hess recorded a sack.
“Playing physical and violent ball,” Metz said of the keys for Fort Hill defensively. “Fort Hill has always been a violent football school. We just had to stay violent and just give the quarterback pressure.”
When Fort Hill began to take its senior starters off the field, Alkire didn’t make a wholesale substitution, he did it one at a time.
It allowed the fourth-year head coach to have a special moment with each member of Fort Hill’s 19-player senior class — a luxury afforded to few schools on championship weekend.
Fort Hill saw red when it walked on the field in Annapolis Saturday, and the players saw it when it walked off the field too.
They looked up in the bleachers and tears filled their eyes.
One final walk for one of the greatest football teams in school history.
“We were able to pull these guys off one and two at a time and really thank them for everything they’ve put in the past eight to 10 years,” Alkire said. “They grew up together. They do the same things in the youth leagues that they do here. That’s one of the reasons why they’re so close.
“To be able to pull them off and thank them for what they did, tears are flowing from their eyes. Looking up in the stands, they want to just thank everybody up there. It’s a whole community.”