PA HS Football Rivalries Part 4

The chat with the PA Football Historian conocludes with some of his favorite rivalries in PA High School football. The LaSalle and Saint Joes annual game along with McDowell versus Cathedral Prep high light this episode.

The Pennsylvania Football History expert from PAFBHISTORY.com is the man with the plan when it comes to collecting data about high school football history in the Commonwealth of PA. He has tapped into Dr. Roger Saylor, the legendary gridiron historian from Penn State, combed through Newspapers.com for tidbits and continues to gather photos, stats, and stories from experts around the country on PA High School Pigskin. The Historian's social media presence is strong especially in the Twitter-sphere, @pa_fb_history. He placed a recent question on Twitter about what people believe the biggest Pennsylvania High School rivalries are. The response was overwhelming and we were lucky to get a chance to sit down with him to go over some of the most talked-about answers to his posted question. They are in no particular ranked order and just a random sampling of some of the more popular ones. This is such good stuff that we are going to break our conversation into multiple parts so that the rivalries don't get lost in the shuffle, and the appreciation of each and the value they bring to all of football can be appreciated.

The third part of our discussion took us to two fierce scholastic arch-rival games in PA.

Cathedral Prep versus McDowell

This rivalry goes back all the way to 1930. Though they played a couple of seasons in the early 1930's they two schools took a break from each other for a few years. At the time of our discussion the Cathedral Prep Ramblers lead the series with 48 wins to the McDowell Trojans 31 victories in the rivalry.

The PA Football Historian explains how often these tow schools have played in the post season. A dozen times in the last 20 plus seasons these team have met in the PIAA District X playoffs.  McDowell football has been led by Head Coach Brad Orlando for over 8 years now and his program has been flying high lately, finding themselves going deep into the PIAA playoffs the past few seasons.

Cathedral Prep football has a strong tradition themselves. Recently retired Coach Mike Mischler guided the Ramblers to five State Titles since 2000 and they played in the championship game and lost four times in the same span. This rivalry lately has been played to support Breast Cancer charities and these young men play their hearts out against this fun rivalry.

LaSalle versus St. Joes

These two giant schools play in the very competitive Philadelphia Catholic League. La Salle College High School Football has won a state championship since the Philly area schools joined the PIAA in 2008. The La Salle Explorers are a perennial top team in the league and are a tough outing on anyone's schedule.

St. Joesephs Prep Football is a dynamo themselves at high school football. St Joe's has won six State Titles in the past decade and a half. Jos leads the series with La Salle 57-37-5 and in the post season they also hold an 8-4 edge over the Explorers.

You can definitely tell from the passion of the PA Football Historian and others that the Keystone State is a breeding ground for awesome hard hitting football and some tremendous rivalries! We hope to be able to cover more of these real soon and not only from Pennsylvania but from all around the country. If you have some you want to talk about get in touch, PigskinDispatch@gmail.com.

The banner photo is a cropped version of the 1947 - Football Program Allentown vs South Philadelphia High School Score: Allentown High School 13, South Philadelphia High School, 12. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons and taken by the Bain News Service.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites: mentioned above and of course the PAFootballNew.com and PAFBHistory.com websites.

Catch part 4 of this series with two more great rivalries in PA High School history releasing Friday 4/29/22.