The first-ever Overtime Nationals High School Football Championship will be broadcast next month on ESPN2.
St. Frances of Baltimore will play Utah’s Corner Canyon on Wednesday, Dec. 10. Kickoff is at 7 p.m. ET at Under Armour Stadium in Baltimore.
Overtime and Peyton Manning's Omaha Productions are behind the contest. Subway is the official presenting sponsor.
Overtime CEO Dan Porter told SBJ the broadcast "should feel like the Super Bowl, epic in how it’s produced."
The winning team receives $250K for its athletics department.
Remember: St. Frances was supposed to play IMG Academy earlier this month; that game was postponed and then canceled when IMG opted not to participate in what turns out to have been this showcase game, citing player safety concerns with over a month between games.
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but this is a national championship game in name only.
St. Frances is consistently a top-5 team across the galaxy of national rankings.
Corner Canyon is no slouch — it just three-peated as Utah 6A champs for its sixth title in eight years — but it is more of a top-50ish team.
Omaha and Overtime have to start somewhere, though. And I would assume the options were limited between logistics and state governing body restrictions this late in the year.
Porter told SBJ he wants to expand the event into a tournament in the future.
The situation reinforces what we wrote when the IMG-St. Frances game fell apart — if there is going to be media rights interest in elite high school football, there likely needs to be some sort of national roll-up that tethers all the independent powers together.
And if you want to do this, Peyton Manning is a very good person to have involved!
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