A storybook career met its storybook ending on Saturday night.
Todd Dodge, a revolutionary in the high school football game, coached his final game on Saturday night, guiding Austin Westlake to a 40-21 win over Denton Guyer in the Texas Class 6A Division II championship game.
The win gave Dodge his seventh state championship -- four in five years from 2002-06 at Southlake Carroll, and then three consecutive at Westlake.
Dodge's seven titles trail Gordon Wood's nine, GA Moore's eight, and Scott Surratt's eight (and counting) -- with the distinction that all seven of Dodge's crowns were won at Texas' highest level, the most difficult championship to win in all of high school football. He went 7-2 in state championship games; the two losses came by one point and in overtime.
Dodge's 26th and final team was arguably his best. The Chapparals led Class 6A in scoring offense and scoring defense, winning all 16 games by an average of 57-9. In the playoffs alone, Westlake dropped 70 points twice, won another game 56-0, and blitzed defending 6A D-II champion Katy 45-14 in the state semifinals. The Chaps closed the 2021 high school football season ranked No. 2 in the nation, bested only by Los Angeles-area super-team Mater Dei.
While Dodge certainly did not invent the spread passing game in high school football, he did as much as anyone to popularize it -- a farmer sowing seeds all across the landscape.
A former Texas quarterback in the early 1980s and the first Texas high school quarterback to throw for 3,000 yards in a season, Dodge set UT records for passing yards in a single play, game and season. His career began as the quarterbacks and receivers coach at Rockwall (Texas) High School in 1987. After a brief run as an assistant at North Texas, he landed his first head coaching job at Cameron Yoe in 1994. From there, Dodge coached at Carrollton Newman Smith and Keller Fossil Ridge before landing the Southlake Carroll job in 2000. The Dragons were on the come-up when Dodge got the job -- Bob Ledbetter led them to 3A championships in 1988, '92 and '93 -- but it was under his direction that Southlake became a dynasty. Representing one of the richest suburbs in America with their trademark bleach-blonde hair, the Dragons of the early 2000s were famous and infamous: the New York Yankees of high school football, the team everyone wanted to beat and hardly anyone ever did.
From 2002-06, Southlake Carroll went 79-1, its lone setback coming 16-15 to Katy in the 2003 5A D-II state championship.
Dodge's teams mowed through the competition with an ahead-of-its time passing attack, piloted by future Division I quarterbacks: Chase Wasson (Texas State), Chase Daniel (Missouri), Greg McElroy (Alabama) and Riley Dodge (North Texas).
Daniel would go on to set the standard for highly-paid NFL career backups. McElroy played briefly in the NFL and now analyzes college football games on ESPN. Dodge is now the head coach at Southlake Carroll.
Dodge parlayed his Southlake Carroll run into an unsuccessful stint as the head coach at North Texas, where he went 6-37 in four seasons from 2007-10. After a season as the quarterbacks coach at Pittsburgh, he returned to the Motherland as the head coach at Marble Falls in 2012.
Two seasons later, Dodge took over at Austin Westlake. His Sam Ehlinger-led team reached the state championship in 2015, and the Chapparals returned in 2019, the beginning of his second 3-peat. Saturday night's victory sends Dodge off with a 45-1 run where, once again, the lone setback came by a single point.
Dodge's legacy extends well beyond the tony streets of Southlake and West Austin, though. Last year, eight of the NFL's 32 starting quarterbacks played their high school ball in Texas, a generation raised in Dodge's world, where the path to the top was traveled by air and not by ground. Ten Texas signal callers signed Power 5 scholarships earlier this week (one more than California), a group headed by Austin Westlake 5-star Cade Klubnik. (Quinn Ewers would've been the No. 1 QB in 2022 had he not re-classified to 2021. He played for Riley Dodge at Southlake Carroll. The Ewers family moved to Southlake because of its football program.)
Perhaps it's not a coincidence that Dodge's Southlake Carroll aerial assault began almost immediately after Cedric Benson carried Midland Lee to consecutive 5A championships from 1998-00. Texas schoolboys used to dream of becoming the next Earl Campbell, the next Billy Sims, the next LaDanian Tomlinson; now they dream of being the next Kyler Murray, the next Patrick Mahomes, the next Cade Klubnik.
The past 20 years have been proof positive that Texas high school football is the breadbasket that feeds the entire sport. What happens under the Friday night trickles upward to the Big 12, then to the rest of college football, then to the NFL. Dodge did not create that revolution by himself, no one person did. But on the spread passing game Mount Rushmore, alongside Hal Mumme, Sonny Detmer and Mike Leach rests the visage of Todd Dodge.