Pasadena Muir (8-6) travels to Blythe Palo Verde (13-1) for a Division V-AA playoff

These aren’t the 1935-vintage Muir Mustangs, featuring a future baseball great named Jackie Robinson, who came South and manhandled unbeaten Hoover, 27-0.

These Mustangs are more like the Mustangs who came South from 1947-54 and lost seven of nine games to San Diego, Hoover, and Grossmont.  Muir won a home game in the  Pasadena Rose Bowl, 26-7, over Mission Bay in 1957, the last year it played a San Diego-area squad.

The ponies won five of their last six this season and tied for second in the Lower Pacific League, earning themselves a 224-mile jaunt to the farming community on the California-Arizona border.

YELLOWJACKETS FAVORED

The computer algorithms of calpreps.com gives Palo Verde Valley (13-1) a 53 per cent chance of victory.

Blythe was largely unsuccessful after it  left the Southern Section and joined the San Diego Section with El Centro Central, El Centro Southwest, Calexico Vincent Memorial, Calexico, and Brawley, the entire Imperial Valley League, in 2000.

Wally Grant arrived as head coach in 2019 and the Yellowjackets were 6-6 in their final year in the Imperial Valley circuit.  They moved to the more accommodating Manzanita League in 2020.

The Manzanita got a new name in 2021 and Grant’s scrappers have become Desert League kings, going 11-3 in 2021 and 13-1 this season.

University City is not trying to climb Mt. San Jacinto this week; the Centurions are attempting a different climb, over San Jacinto High, but the calpreps.com computer suggests that neither the hypothetical or real option favors coach Paul Lawrence’s team.

Calpreps gives the Tigers a 65 per cent chance of winning the Division III-AA playoff on its home field in the community 87 miles northeast of the U.C. campus.

Mt. San Jacinto, elevation 10,384 feet and connected to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, stares down on the city of 45,000 persons, six miles as the crow flies and 47 miles by auto from the Tigers’ campus.

San Jacinto High is many millenniums younger but still one of the oldest schools in Riverside County.  It opened in 1910.  University City followed 73 years later.

The Tigers (12-2) rolled undefeated through the Mountain Pass League this season against  Perris, Hemet Tahquitz, Perris Citrus Hill, Winchester Liberty, and Hemet West Valley.

Their only losses were 46-36 to Temecula Chaparral in Week 3 and 28-27 to Beaumont in Week 5. The Tigers defeated Orange El Modena, 42-15, for the Southern Section D-VI championship. El Modena’s 26.6 calpreps.com rating almost matched University City’s 27.6, which is at a distance from the the Tigers’ 34.8.

The Centurions (11-2) defeated Point Loma, 33-28, for the San Diego Section D-III championship as Samuel Cooper, all 6-feet, 3 inches, and 230 pounds at quarterback, ran 3 and 35 yards for touchdowns and hooked up with Dreyden Carter on a 65-yard touchdown pass play in the second half.

The victory was U. City’s ninth in a row, tying the school record by the 9-2 team of 1992.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA PLAYOFF BRACKETS

TRUE GRID

San Jacinto holds a 16-6 lead in an off-and-on series with San Diego-area teams, since the first game, a 32-7 loss to Harry Wexler’s Escondido Cougars in 1929…except for visiting Eastlake’s 31-14 victory  in 2019 there had been no Tiger sightings here since 1984…an oddity of San Diego’s separation from the Southern Section was that Fallbrook, which joined the Tigers in the DeAnza League in 1959, remained in the Riverside County loop in 1960 although a part of the new San Diego Section….