Sports

Texas High School QB Sam Ehlinger Named AP Player Of Year

December 18, 2015 / 5:11 AM CST / CBS Texas

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DALLAS (AP) - Sam Ehlinger has a chance to achieve something only Drew Brees did before him: lead Austin Westlake to a Texas football championship.

And the dual threat quarterback is trying to get there with a coach who knows a thing or two about winning high school titles in the Lone Star State. Todd Dodge won four in five years at Southlake Carroll a decade ago before making the rare jump to a college head coaching job.

Win or lose against Galena Park North Shore in the Class 6A Division I championship game Saturday in Houston, Ehlinger already has a piece of history. He's the first junior to win the Texas Associated Press Sports Editors player of the year award announced Friday.

Ehlinger was the winner in a vote among eight sports writers and editors on a ballot that included the 10 offensive and defensive players of the year in the five classifications of the Texas AP's all-state teams. The previous eight winners, including Johnny Manziel with Kerrville Tivy in 2010, were all seniors.

"There's been great quarterbacks before him," Dodge said of the 6A offensive player of the year. "But in this era he's setting a great example for guys to come in the future."

Brees, a Super Bowl winner with the New Orleans Saints, led Westlake to its only title in 1996. Westlake has lost in six other trips to the finals, including 2006 when current St. Louis Rams quarterback Nick Foles lost in Dodge's final game with Carroll before he took the job at North Texas.

Dodge is looking for another title after a rough four-year stint at North Texas, a year as a college assistant and two years of missing the Texas high school playoffs at Marble Falls, not far from Austin. The former Texas quarterback has in Ehlinger an expected three-year starter who plans to sign with the Longhorns in 2017.

"I'm having a lot of fun," said Dodge, who led Carroll to five straight title games and a 79-1 record from 2002-06. "It does rekindle some because of the way that these kids have responded. This was a place that has seen winning going on. It has skins on the wall and that's even more impressive that these kids have bought in so quickly."

Ehlinger's father, Ross Ehlinger, died of an apparent heart attack while competing at a triathlon in San Francisco in 2013, when the oldest of his three kids was 14.

About 18 months later, Ehlinger was the sophomore starter in Dodge's first game as Westlake coach -- before a sellout crowd on Dodge's old home field, Dragon Stadium in Southlake. Westlake lost that game, but Dodge knew he had his quarterback.

"He made some mistakes in that game, and I found out real quick, they'd roll right off his back," Dodge said. "It's kind of like when you've had that adversity with your father, throwing an interception is not that big a deal."

After falling in the first round of the playoffs last year, Westlake reached the finals this season by ending three-time defending champion Allen's 57-game winning streak -- the second-longest in Texas history behind Celina's 68-game run from 1998 to 2002.

Ehlinger finished the regular season with 35 touchdowns and no interceptions, and he's up to 50 TDs with five interceptions and 3,614 yards passing. He goes into Saturday's game with 5,939 career yards and 75 touchdowns.

That's more in both categories than Brees or Foles, and he has a year to go.

Comparisons to Dodge's quarterbacks at Carroll will be inevitable. Dodge offered Chase Daniel, who had a successful career at Missouri and is still in the NFL as a backup with Kansas City.

"You really talk about a guy making all the throws, he can make them all," Dodge said of Ehlinger. "Probably similar to the other ones that we've had in the past, he throws a lot of touchdown passes. And that's something that all of them did."

A year from now, Ehlinger might be something nobody else is: a two-time winner of the Texas AP player of the year award.

Texas