Different journeys, same destination for M-A, San Mateo football teams

“We try to get a triple (option) team on our schedule, especially when you have a team like that in your league,” Saunders said.

This year, he chose to schedule San Mateo, which like Wilcox, relies almost exclusively on a triple-option package. Little did Saunders know that 42-28 win over the Bearcats in a Week 5 meeting would be the perfect scouting opportunity for a section championship game.

The third-seeded Bears (6-6) will face off against eighth-seeded San Mateo (9-3) for the Central Coast Section Division III title at 7 p.m. Saturday at MacDonald High School in San Jose.

“That’s always your best film, a previous matchup,” Saunders said.

But that scouting works both ways and San Mateo got just as good a look at the Bears as M-A did of the Bearcats. And with everything else being equal, it was a mental hurdle, more than anything else, that the Bearcats overcame.

“We had them on the schedule and we said, ‘God, we got M-A,’” Scheller said. “But we played well. … If we didn’t play them in Week 5, that mystique would be a much bigger deal in the finals.”

And when the Bears and Bearcats do meet Saturday night, you will not find two teams with more different styles of offense. M-A uses more a traditional pro-set style of offense, one that is predicated on getting the running game going, which opens up the pass game.

But Saunders is not wedded to run-first, pass-second. He’ll do what ever a defense allows, but the bottom line is, he wants to be successful running the ball.

“It’s like the chicken or the egg type of thing,” Saunders said.

That played out in the Bears’ 36-14 semifinal win over Sacred Heart Prep last week. The Bears used the pass to set up the run and yet, at the end of the game, still had 134 yards rushing to go along with 231 yards passing.

While M-A running back Eva Ama has the ability to score any time he touches the ball, he rushed for 100 yards and a touchdown last week, San Mateo’s Scheller is actually more concerned about Bears quarterback Teddy Dacey. Scheller said if Dacey has time, he can beat the Bearcats with his arm or his legs.

“The key is the quarterback. He’s really good and he can run,” Scheller said. “If you don’t have a pass rush, if you let a guy hang out for a while, containing him becomes a problem.

“It’s not necessary stopping them. It’s just about slowing them down.”

For San Mateo, there is no question about what the Bearcats want to do: run, run, and run some more. First, they’ll try to bludgeon opposing defenses right up the gut before hitting them with perimeter runs.

An offense that relies on precision, execution and misdirection, the Bearcats force teams to simply try and stop them. The Bearcats have a chance to go over the 4,000-yard rushing mark as a team. They enter Saturday’s game with 3,717 yards and if they stick to their average of 337 yards per game, they should get the mark.

“They’re a team that runs the triple and they run it well,” Saunders said of the San Mateo offense. And like Scheller, Saunders is concerned with Bearcats junior quarterback Lukas Fitzgerald, who is the team’s leading rusher with 1,496 yards on the season.

“Their quarterback makes everything go,” Saunders said.

Different paths to the final

In addition to wildly different offenses, both M-A and San Mateo made it to the CCS championship game by following extremely different paths.

For the Bearcats, this whole season was a new experience. For the first time since playing in the Peninsula Athletic League’s Bay Division in 2006, San Mateo found itself playing in the “A” league when it got moved for 2025 into the De Anza Division from the Ocean Division, one step below the Bay.

“We’re still new to being up in an ‘A’ division,” Scheller said, who added there were questions at the beginning of the season.

“Hopefully, we can compete (at this level),” Scheller continued. “We do goal setting in the spring and we wanted them to own (this journey).”

And as the season went along, the Bearcats proved that not could they compete, they could challenge for the De Anza Division title, eventually finishing solo second place with a 4-1 record, behind only King’s Academy.

“There were plenty of times we (the coaching staff) have watched this team, going, ‘We’re pretty good,’” Scheller said. “We just got better and better. … Now, it’s become more normal.”

Now the Bearcats hope to finish things off with their first CCS crown since 2003.

Meanwhile, M-A was simply hoping to figure things out on the fly as Bears were hard-pressed to even find silver linings as they were thumped in their first three games of the season — losing 41-7 to Destiny Christian Academy-Sacramento, 42-3 to Acalanes-Lafayette and to Mitty, 35-0.

Things got so bad that Saunders said a handful of player quit and the team had to have what is commonly called a “come to Jesus” meeting, during which everyone is allowed to speak freely.

“When you’re confronted with not just losing, but the way we lost, we just weren’t competitive. There was a lot of new experiences for everybody,” Saunders said. “There was really some big, challenging moments along the way, but also some of the best and rewarding ones.”

Saunders said he saw light at the end of the tunnel in Week 4, during a 28-13 loss to California-San Ramon.

“The Cal game was the first game we played football,” Saunders said. “We had a chance to win that thing in the fourth (quarter).”

So when the Bears parlayed that performance into the win over San Mateo the following week, there was a huge amount of relief.

“You would have thought we won the Super Bowl,” Saunders said. “With the way that game played out, they earned [the win]. We had to win it in the fourth. … That was the first time this year they all came together.”

That was the start of a run that saw M-A win five of last seven games and now sees the Bears playing for the their first CCS title since 2018.