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COLUMBIA, MISSOURI – Liberty North had been waiting for this.
The Eagles had their football season ended by CBC in each of the past two seasons – in the Missouri Class 6 championship game in 2021 and in the semifinals a year ago – and got another shot at the reigning two-time champions on Saturday.
Liberty North made the most of its opportunity. The Eagles dominated the final three quarters by scoring 38 unanswered points and secured the school’s first state championship with a 38-7 victory at Memorial Stadium.
“They’re the standard,” Liberty North coach Andy Lierman said of CBC. “They’re the ones that have been here the last couple of years. They’re the ones on top of the mountain and we’ve been climbing and scraping and clawing to get there and have fallen short a couple times. We’ve been in the semi the last three years and this was the fourth year in a row we made it there and we’d just kind of fallen short. Before the season these guys set a goal out and they knew what they wanted to do and they set that goal in front of them and they just kept marching towards it each and every day.”
The game was ended with 3 minutes and 15 seconds left.
“I kind of asked if we could stop it just because of the nature of what we perceived as dangerous plays going on there,” CBC coach Scott Pingel said. “I just wanted to make sure that we all got out of there without anything else happening.”
There were no post-game handshakes. The teams were separated when they were awarded their respective trophies.
There were 17 penalties for 165 yards called: CBC had 12 penalties (110 yards) and Liberty North had five (55 yards). The Eagles had a player ejected midway through the fourth quarter.
Liberty North (13-1), the No. 1 team in the SBLive Missouri Power 25 rankings, racked up 337 yards of total offense, led by junior quarterback Tillman Martin, senior wide receiver Keelan Smith and senior running back MicahJo Barnett.
Martin completed 10 of 20 passes for 180 yards and two touchdowns – both to Smith, who finished with four catches for 133 yards. Barnett ran for 120 yards and two TDs on 20 carries.
CBC (11-3), ranked fifth in the SBLive Power 25 rankings, was attempting to become the first school since Jefferson City in 1976-78 to win three consecutive championships in Missouri’s largest classification. There were four classes then.
The Cadets had 191 yards of total offense. The Cadets were limited to 47 rushing yards on 35 carries – an average of 1.3 yards per – and four players combined to complete nine of 26 passes for 144 yards, one touchdown and two interceptions.
“It was their night, for sure,” Pingel said. “We didn’t do very much on offense and our defense was playing pretty good early on but we just ran out of gas and they handed it to us pretty good. I wish it would have finished a little bit better, but it is what it is and hopefully we’ll move on from this.”
CBC’s Jeremiah McClellan, an Ohio State commit who accounted for 104 of his team’s 191 total yards, said Liberty North just wanted it more.
“They had a great scheme for us,” the senior wide receiver said. “Like Coach (Pingel) said, we couldn’t really get our outside routes. They just flat out wanted it more. They are a great team, a great team.”
Liberty North focused on stopping the run on Saturday night after struggling in that area its past two meetings with CBC.
The Cadets ran for 271 yards against Liberty North in the 2021 title game and then amassed 360 rushing yards in the semifinals a year ago.
“If you look back to last year, we didn’t do that very well,” Lierman said. “So we put a lot of emphasis on that. We really challenged our guys to come out and play the run well tonight. We knew we had to shut it down. We knew they would go to it. We just practiced it all week, we worked on some different things, had some different things schematically than what we’d done all year to try to give them some different looks and we felt like it was working pretty well throughout the game and really just stuck with it.”
Two-time reigning champion CBC was battered, bruised and bullied by the hungry Eagles, who avenged their two previous losses against the Cadets to become the first public high school in Liberty’s district to win a state football championship.
“It means everything,” said senior linebacker Melvin Laster Jr., a UNLV pledge and four-year starter who had a team-high eight tackles and five quarterback hits and one of the Liberty North’s four sacks. “Since I’ve been playing since freshman year, we never got the chance to beat CBC and now that we’ve finally done it it feels like the best thing in the world.”
Lierman said the difference in the game was his team’s physicality.
“We preached that all week long,” he said. “We felt like we were the more physical team and we proved that tonight. These guys played their butts off, but not only did they play their butts off, they were physical in all aspects. That’s why we train. We’ve been going since the Tuesday after Martin Luther King Day, lifting weights, running hills, doing sprints, doing everything we can to get ourselves in a chance to win a game like this out here on this field on this night.”
Missouri Class 6 football championship: Liberty North – CBC
MISSOURI CHAMPIONSHIPS SCOREBOARD (12/1/2023)
MISSOURI CHAMPIONSHIPS SCOREBOARD (12/2/2023)
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– Nate Latsch | latsch@scorebooklive.com | @SBLiveMiz
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