You had to be there for Kyler Mania
Three reporters who covered Kyler Murray's high school career reflect on the Texas legend
By Matthew Coller
On December 14, 2013, around 20,000 people showed up to Mesquite Memorial Stadium to find out if Kyler Murray was actually invincible.
Murray’s 14-0 Allen High School was taking on undefeated powerhouse DeSoto for a chance to play in the state championship at AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys.
The junior quarterback who ran like lightning and threw touch passes that dropped into receivers’ hands like they had butterfly wings had already become the biggest act in Texas football after taking Allen to a state championship as a sophomore and destroying opponents throughout his junior year.
This game was different. DeSoto was very good.
The weather was also less than ideal. Around 40 degrees with 20 mph winds were not the conditions that Murray would prefer for downfield passing.
For the first time since he took over as Allen’s starter, Murray was at serious risk of losing. Before that game, he won his first 26 contests. And with 8:37 remaining, his team was trailing 35-20.
Is this where Superman finally meets his kryptonite? Allen hadn’t trailed in any game all year since the opener. Will his Houdini act hold up? Is this proof Murray is mortal?
What he did next — if there weren’t articles and videos, you’d say it was fiction, straight out of the movie Friday Night Lights. Those who weren’t there will tell you they were. Those in attendance will pass the story through generations.
But to understand the ending of the DeSoto game, you need the whole story…
The rise of Kyler
The funny thing about Kyler Murray’s stardom is that it starts with a sports radio show.
In 2005 a show called BaD Radio on 1310 The Ticket in Dallas was doing a segment where they read listener emails and they received one from a parent involved with youth football for seven and eight-year-olds. They were named the Vikings and their coach was a former Texas A&M quarterback named Keith Murray.
The radio show offered $200 for a jersey sponsorship and the team accepted.
In the coming weeks, they started getting emails back from Murray letting them know that the BaD Radio show squad was crushing opponents by 30+ points and they were en route to the championship game.
Hosts Bob Sturm and Dan McDowell were invited to attend the game.
They couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw the kid wearing No. 1 running circles around the other squad. Keith Murray’s kid Kyler was unbelievable. They vowed to keep track of where he ended up once he got to high school.
Seven years later, the name Kyler Murray reemerged at one of the biggest schools in the state, Allen High School. The school is best known for having a stadium that has the fifth largest capacity of any school in Texas and cost $60 million. It opened in 2012, just as Murray was arriving.
NBC 5 DWF sports reporter Pat Doney just started covering football in Dallas around 2011. Before Murray’s sophomore season, he spoke with Allen’s offensive coordinator at a coach’s clinic and they chatted about the quarterback position for the upcoming season. The Allen assistant coach thought that they were going to have to run the Wing-T offense that year because they had just graduated a good quarterback and were unsure about the position.
Murray wasn’t the Week 1 starter, so they ran a version of the Wing-T — which is a run-heavy system that teams use when they have a rushing QB who can’t really throw — and it wasn’t going particularly well. In Week 3, they were playing Coppell High School, a strong program, and they were down in the game. Allen coach Tom Westerberg decided to make the switch and bring in the small kid with crazy wheels.
Allen lost the game in overtime but Murray instantly showed that he belonged and gave them a chance to win the game.
“And they never had to think about the Wing-T ever again,” Doney said over the phone.
Murray started to win and win. In the state championship game, Allen beat Lamar High School 35-21 to take the title.
Kyler’s junior year blow up
Kyler Mania was just in its early stages though. As exciting as he was, some folks argued that the team had been so strong that it gave Murray a chance to become a winner.
“A lot of people like to try to downplay it because they say, well, it was Allen,” Doney said. “Allen is always good. But if you look at what Allen has done since Kyler Murray has left, they’ve only won one state championship….So it was like putting Shohei Ohtani on the Dodgers.”
In his junior year, Murray started putting up performances that had rarely ever been seen in Texas football. On opening night, he went for 460 yards passing and averaged 27 yards per attempt and rushed for 80 yards and totaled five touchdowns. Two weeks later, Allen scored 62 points in an 18-for-24, 276 yard, three-touchdown showing. The next week they posted 77 points and Murray ran for 146 and scored seven touchdowns.
In years past, when a mythical player in Texas high school football emerged like this, the only folks who would really know what was going on were in that particular community. You could see highlights on the local news every Friday night and read about it in the newspaper. But Murray’s emergence was different. Twitter and other social media sites had just started to become popular and suddenly Murray’s insane highlight reel could be viewed by anyone, any time. He became an instant celebrity.
Greg Tepper, editor-in-chief of the longtime high school sports magazine Dave Campbell’s Texas Sports said that in the social media era, people could get a much better understanding of Murray’s dominance.
“He’s the biggest phenomenon in Texas high school football history, that I’m comfortable saying,” Tepper said over the phone. “There’s a really interesting story to be written at some point about him coming up in the era, like the early days of video internet. One of the other guys who I think is on the very short list of greatest high school football players ever is Cedric Benson. Cedric Benson, when he was at Midland Lee, he was a myth. He was a message board myth. He was a guy who was like, like, ‘oh, there’s this kid out there in oil country. And you’ll never believe it, but he’s 17 feet tall.’ He was a folktale. Yeah. He was unbelievable. Kyler Murray, you got to see it up close and in person. And you got to see it on live television and on Twitter. It was different.”
In the five games before Murray’s matchup with the monsters from DeSoto, Allen won 42-13, 63-6, 42-14, 56-21 and 48-13. The closest matchup of the entire season was a 36-17 victory.
Matt Stepp, High School Insider for Dave Campbell’s Texas Sports had never seen anything quite like it.
“His junior year is when it really — the legend of Kyler really started to manifest itself,” Stepp said over the phone. “He was just so dominant. I’ve been covering Texas high school football for 20 years, but I’ve been around it for as long as I can remember. There’s very few players that have come through that had the kind of aura that Kyler had. Like, when Kyler stepped on the field, you just knew there was no way that Allen was going to lose.”
The hype grew and grew.
“There was always this buzz in the building when Allen played with Kyler Murray,” Stepp said. “You could see it how he’d warm up and there’d just be people not exactly gawking at him, but in awe. I don’t want to compare a high school football player to Michael Jordan but you know you talk to people where he played and you watch the ESPN documentary The Last Dance and people talk about as soon as he walked onto the court there was this aura about him — Kyler was like that for Texas high school football. He walked on the field and the defenses could throw whatever they could throw at Allen and he would find a way.”
Kyler Mania was hitting a fever pitch but the matchup with DeSoto was different than other competitors that Allen faced that year.
While DeSoto didn’t have a guy who ended up being the Heisman Trophy winner or the NFL’s No. 1 overall pick, they did have a quarterback who was dominating high school football at a similar level as Murray.
Senior Desmon White, who went on to play wide receiver at TCU, was the Associated Press Texas 5A Player of the Year and his district’s Most Valuable Player as a senior. White passed for 2,886 yards while running for 1,175 that year and scored a combined 43 touchdowns. A beast. With White at the helm, DeSoto posted 50+ points eight times that season.
As the game went along, it was clear that White was on his game and Allen was struggling to stop him on the ground. He finished with 189 yards rushing. On the other side, Murray’s magic wasn’t working the same way that it had all season.
Those who were there saw a side of Murray that they had never seen before when the team was suddenly trailing for the first time.
“When they were losing, you could see that leadership and that he was chewing some people out. I remember seeing a different side of Kyler,” Stepp said. “Maybe because he had to show that different side because they were in trouble in that football game. Maybe he felt like that was the only time he was really in trouble. But most of the time, he was a pretty cool, calm, very low-key, incredible competitor.”
Allen was down 15 early in the fourth quarter and the nearly 20,000 fans packed into the stadium were starting to wonder: Is this where Murray’s magic finally runs out?
“DeSoto is a national powerhouse,” Doney said. “They are an incredible program. Everyone who was in the stadium remembers, I was right there, feeling like, what’s Kyler going to do now? How is he going to pull this out of the bag?”
After DeSoto scored to bring the lead to 35-20, Murray struck back instantly, throwing a deep dime to his wide receiver Jalen Guyton, hitting him perfectly on the run and he did the rest for a 68-yard touchdown.
“If you gave him an inch, he would take a mile,” Doney said. “That is what I remember covering him in high school: you could not make any mistakes against that Allen team because if you let the door open just a little bit, Murray at 5’10”, or whatever he is, was coming and he was ramming the door down.”
Allen scored a defensive touchdown to bring them within two points. On the two-point conversion, Murray rolled out to his right but couldn’t find a receiver, so he bought time by dancing around, then flipped the ball all the way back across the field to a wide open target to tie the game at 35-35.
With one chance to win the game in regulation, Allen was forced to punt, but the ball got caught up in the wind and hit a DeSoto player, giving Murray another chance to do something legendary.
Starting at his own 40-yard line, Murray either threw or ran for all 60 yards to reach the end zone, including a 24-yard scamper to win the game.
“He basically goes Super Saiyan, he refuses to lose this game,” Tepper said. “That was the point. It was that game where the myth started. This is the guy you can’t kill. He’s the final boss. He’s the one where you can’t find a way. If he has the ball, he’s going to do it. And that carried through to his senior year.”
“I remember after the game, everyone just having the same smirk and shaking their head saying, ‘I can’t believe it,’” Doney said.
That was basically the closest he ever came to losing.
The following week, Murray played in front of the largest crowd ever to watch a high school football game in Texas, around 54,000 people, and won his second straight state championship.
As a senior Murray had a couple close calls, including another tight game against DeSoto in which he narrowly escaped but he ended up finishing his high school career 42-0.
He finished his final high school season with 4,715 yards and 54 touchdowns and rushed for 1,498 yards and eight TDs.
You’d struggle to post those numbers as an NFL talent at a small school in a tiny division. Doing it at the highest level of Texas college football is sheer insanity.
All three reporters interviewed agreed that Murray had a great case for being the greatest Texas high school football player of all time. That list has Mahomes on it. That list has Stafford on it. Myles Garrett too. And plenty of other legends that didn’t become NFL icons.
“He won Mr. Texas football back-to-back years, 2013, 2014, first time we’ve ever done that,” Tepper said. “I think he’s the biggest phenomenon in Texas high school football history.”
The phenom and the future
Tepper admits that he had a “freezing cold take” about Murray when he was coming out of high school.
“I’m on record saying he should go play baseball,” Tepper said. “To talk to people in the baseball world, I mean, he was a first-round draft pick in baseball. I was on record saying, hey, if he wants to be a professional athlete, he should go play baseball because he’s too small. Too small to play quarterback. That was the one knock on him was his size.”
Backyard picnic and water cooler sports chatter was filled that summer with discussions over whether he should be playing baseball or football.
“That became a big talking point in a big debate where a lot of sports fans in the area were quickly trying to become his financial advisor and finance counselor,” Doney said. “I’m sure it was a difficult decision for him at the time, but it seemed to me — he didn’t tell me this, his family hasn’t said — but it seemed very clear to me based on the decisions he was making that football was the game, the sport that he loved.”
Also the idea that a crazy playmaking undersized QB couldn’t hold his own at the higher levels had already been smashed by a previous Texas high school football legend.
“He went to A&M, and that was right after Johnny Manziel had set the world on fire in college football, throwing up the money signs, all this stuff,” Doney said. “We had seen a dynamic, game-changing playmaker take over the world. The guy was unbelievable at the highest level of Texas high school football. And if you do that, it’s hard for me to believe that you’re not going to be able to have some level of success in college.”
The rest is history there. It took until Murray transferred to Oklahoma to find his footing and once again he rose to the occasion as a freakish playmaker and wildly accurate quarterback, winning the Heisman and being selected No. 1 overall.
During his time in Arizona, the state of Texas hasn’t forgotten about Murray. He has gone through ups and downs — many ups coming against the Cowboys, unsurprisingly — but there is a sense in the Lone Star State that one of their favorite heroes of the past will have new life in Minnesota.
“He’s a winner,” Doney said. “And that’s why I believe he’s on track to get back to his winning ways. It’s just being in the right situation.”
Didn’t realize he went to Allen. I moved to the North Dallas burbs that same year, but I’ve never really followed the local high school sports, other than to shake my head every time they build another $80m high school stadium.