By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
For the third time in their short high school football history, Cooper’s Jaguars will kick it off in a state championship game Saturday (8 p.m.) at UK’s Kroger Field with the Class 5A title on the line.
For the third time, in one of those weird coincidences in sports, the Jags of Randy Borchers, the only coach the Union school has ever known, will line up against the Purples of Bowling Green. To make it even more weird, the year that Cooper’s basketball team made it to the Sweet 16 championship game in 2017, the team that beat them was none other than Bowling Green.
You must not like the color purple, Randy Borchers, Cooper’s head coach since the program started in 2007, was asked. “It’s making me vomit,” he says with a laugh.
But after a pair of championship game 14-point losses to Bowling Geen (34-20 in 2012 and 28-14 a year ago), the unbeaten, high-powered Jaguars have flipped the script this year. They’re the favorites this time.
After outscoring opponents by an average margin of 46.0 to 11.0 on the way to a 14-0 season, the top-ranked Jags were supposed to get there after falling short their first trip to Lexington and now they’re coming back for a second straight season while a 12-2 Bowling Green wasn’t the favorite in its own district behind the South Warren team they beat to get to Lexington.
“They were in the situation we’re in now,” Borchers said after upsetting Highlands in the playoffs in 2023. “We’d won a couple of upsets, and it was all new to our guys.”
Now it’s not. “Our kids made a commitment last Dec. 2 . . . “ Borchers said, that they’d be back. Cooper took a monster step in the right direction in last week’s semifinal showdown against 23-time state champion Highlands in a 56-7 second-half explosion triggered by a simple Borchers question: “Are we a championship team or not?” Borchers asked his guys as they trailed 17-7 at halftime.
“We are,” their second half performance said. But that was last week. This week is an entirely different story against a Bowling Green team led by many of the same players who sent Cooper to defeat a year ago on Kroger Field.
Sent them down with a minus-27 team rushing yards thanks to a half-dozen sacks on then-sophomore quarterback Cam O’Hara (for a minus-52 yards) as his 220 passing yards could not make up for those losses. Bowling Green, meanwhile, gained 311 yards – 199 passing, 112 rushing – on their way to four touchdowns.
“They were just quicker than we were at the line of scrimmage,” says Cooper Director of Football Operations Shayne Beckett, a top running back himself for Boone County’s Owen Hauck playoff teams from 1981-’83. There’s an almost new offensive line and a new coach there in Bob Burnett, the former Dixie Heights head coach and Beechwood assistant.
“Bob has made a big difference,” Beckett says. As for the quick-armed O’Hara, sacking him isn’t the same this season now that he’s a 6-2, 190-pound junior with quick feet to match his arm. In his 14 games this season, O’Hara has thrown for 3,335 yards and 49 touchdowns with just three interceptions.
“They brought pressure,” Borchers said, “Cam was under duress all night and we didn’t handle it very well.” This year they have many more answers starting with a trio of top senior receivers who were all around a year ago. But they’re in a different place this season. They’re also all basketball players.
Six-foot-3 Isaiah Johnson has 59 catches for 1,209 yards and 23 TDs. Jaiden Combs, 6-2, has 42 catches for 892 yards and eight TDs. And 6-3, 235-pound tight end/edge rusher Austin Alexander, headed for the University of North Carolina, and also a basketball guy, matches Combs with 42 catches for 677 yards and 12 TDs.
What teams will do to try to defend this trio is anybody’s guess. “We’ve seen so many different looks to try to stop these guys,” Borchers says, that watching film to scout opponents isn’t always that much help. “We kind of adapt as we go,” he says.
Which is what the Jags did last week when lead runner Keagan Maher, pretty much Cooper’s whole show in the run game, couldn’t play with a broken index finger. Junior Ryker Campbell, another basketball guy but just 5-8, 150 pounds, stepped in to rush for three TDs and 106 yards. “A great football player,” Borchers says of his leading tackler and interceptor.
Joining Campbell in a 1-2 backfield punch was senior linebacker Mason Stanton, a 178-pounder, who “did a great job for us” in pass protection for O’Hara and carried it himself. Maher is “day-to-day” and will probably be “a Saturday decision,” if he plays or how much, Borchers said.
Bowling Green’s junior quarterback Deuce Bailey, a dual-threat junior with 3,033 yards passing and 45 TDs with eight interceptions is the featured guy.
“The thing with Bowling Green is they have big playmakers. Deuce throws a really good ball but if you get lost on any one of their skill players, as we did once last year on Bailey, they can really hurt you with a long play. “We have to be very disciplined,” Borchers says.
Bowling Green coach Mark Spader, whose defending state champions have won a pair of state titles since 2017, describes his team this way: “We’ve got a veteran team with some really good seniors. We’ve gone back to work and they’ve responded.”
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.