Saraland’s Deshawn Spencer, who is emerging as the Spartans’ next star receiver, makes an incredible catch for a touchdown on this pass from K.J. Lacey late in the first half of Friday night’s Class 6A state championship game against Parker at Protective Stadium in Birmingham. Spencer grabbed the pass while sandwiched between Thundering Hard defenders Joseph Holt (21) and Na’eem Offord, one of the nation’s top cornerbacks. (Helen Joyce/Call News)
Saraland’s K.J. Lacey (front), C.D. Gill (0) and Zion Williams (13) are consoled after losing to Parker 28-17 in the Super 7 finals Friday night. The defeat marked the end of an ultra-successful era led by players such as Lacey, Gill and Williams. (Helen Joyce/Call News)
Saraland coach Jeff Kelly walks back to his players after accepting the runner-up Red Map. It was another disappointing loss for Kelly in the finals but the Spartans have been established as a perennial championship contender. (Helen Joyce/Call News)
You can’t see the smokestacks from Interstate 65 going through Saraland. They must be there, right? Because some say Jeff Kelly has built a football factory that manufactures championships. But that insinuates that he slaps and sews and bolts the parts together dispassionately. If Kelly were supervising an assembly line, he’d have clones of K.J. Lacey, Ryan Williams, Santae McWilliams, C.D. Gill and Antonio Coleman every year and the Spartans would never lose.
As it is, these men of flesh and bone and blood and skill rarely absorb a defeat but when they do, they feel it. While watching time — that undefeated arbiter of all worldly things — wrap itself around Saraland’s players Friday night at the end of their 28-17 loss to Parker, I watched their tears flow as they got pulled into history. Robots don’t cry, showing that Kelly doesn’t merely press a button to order up more indestructible players.
There is a difference in sewing and sowing and Kelly’s way is more of a cultivation, a seasonal harvest of bounty. Plant some seeds, tend to them and watch them grow. Each season, the Spartans have different players whom Kelly and his assistant coaches work at a frenetic pace but the results are mostly the same.
Lacey issued his own Farmer’s Almanac late Friday night while leaning against a wall in the lower reaches of Protective Stadium to help ease the discomfort of the defeat and a sore ankle incurred during one of the six sacks Parker inflicted on him.
“It stings a little bit right now,” Lacey said after his final high school game, “but the program is going to be great for a long time.”
Because of its success, an institutional jealousy of Saraland has emerged. That’s not unusual because it’s human nature for people outside of any kingdom to root for the palace walls to crumble and they have reveled in the Spartans’ misery in the last two Class 6A state championship games. This a team within 14 points of three straight Blue Maps. They were a yard short on the last play last year; they were a yard short of tying it this year.
But it’s doubtful the loss to the Thundering Herd in Birmingham will jettison Saraland from its accustomed place atop the sport.
“We have so many players that have meant so much to this team and the success that our program has had,” Kelly said. “We’ve had some players that are highly decorated and everybody knows about. We’ve also had a ton of young men who maybe not everybody in the state knows but they’re absolute warriors. When I think of a guy like Santae McWilliams and what he’s done over the last four years and what he’s meant to this program — the consistency, the toughness, the attitude, the leadership that he’s brought — those are the kind of young men that change a program. It’s easy for a younger player to do things right when they see the older guys doing things right. And when that happens, you start to have consistency over time in your program.”
Kelly does have some new planting to do. He’s losing a symphony of fine players in Lacey, McWilliams, Gill and Coleman, people with a magnificent consistency of excellence whom he built around and who delivered the school’s first Blue Map in 2022 as sophomores.
Kelly must replace nine starters on an offense that averaged 45 points per game the last three years, including four on the offensive line, a quarterback who ended his career as the No. 2 all-time passer in Alabama High School Athletic Association history (Lacey), a running back who had nearly 5,000 career rushing yards (McWilliams), a wide receiver who almost always made every catch a first down (Gill) and a defensive lineman who still made plays despite frequent double teams and freed everyone else to do their jobs (Coleman).
Kelly has some stakes to tie to. The defense retains six starters. Deshawn Spencer is a star in the making at wideout. Jamison Roberts will be the new quarterback and the 6-foot-4 sophomore played well in two games while Lacey recuperated from a knee sprain, completing a Lacey-like 34 of 48 passes for 492 yards with eight touchdowns and no interceptions. (As an FYI, Lacey’s career passer rating is an excellent 126.3 and Roberts’ was 143.4 this year. For a point of reference, former Alabama Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Bryce Young — to whom Lacey has been favorably compared — had a passer rating of 116.3 in college.)
Although Lacey finished 40 yards south of the AHSAA’s career passing yardage record, nothing can minimize his greatness no matter the circumstances or those who surrounded him. Yes, the Texas signee played in a system that presented him a lot of high-percentage passes but a lot of other quarterbacks have had that setup and not performed nearly as well. He was 39-3 as a starter with a state championship and two runner-up finishes, had 10,985 career yards and 132 touchdowns and he did it with and without Williams, without Dillon Alfred most of this season, with a different offensive line each of the last three seasons and with teams knowing what they were about to see but were still powerless to stop.
Williams was on the sideline Friday night but it’s debatable if he could have altered the outcome, so thorough was Parker’s ownership of the line of scrimmage. Williams would have provided explosive plays and at the very least drawn so much attention that he would have given Gill and Spencer more one-on-one opportunities and surely lightened the box and made it easier for McWilliams to find running room — but that still wouldn’t have solved the problems the Spartans had with Parker’s running game.
Before he headed out to the Forty Acres to start his collegiate years, Lacey faced one final examination against the most formidable defense he had faced in his high school career on one acre of frozen artificial turf in downtown Birmingham. That defense had but one objective: to trample Lacey, to pull his eyes down to the ground instead of afield, to make him frantically seek refuge as they poured through the gate and knocked it off its hinges, to force him to fumble with his holster and perhaps shoot himself in the foot before he could turn his doomsday weapon of a right arm on them.
Frankly, it’s amazing that Saraland and Lacey were as close as they were considering how overwhelmingly the Thundering Herd’s college-laden defensive line lived up to its name. Of the 36 times Lacey went back to pass, he was able to cleanly set his feet and throw only seven times. The other 29 times, he felt white jerseys closing in — especially the one that giant Jourdin Crawford was bursting out of — tried to roll away from them or was sacked. And Parker got to him despite blitzing only four times.
“We hadn’t really played against anybody like that,” Lacey said.
Several opposing coaches said the Spartans’ offensive line was their weakness but, incidentally, none of those coaches beat them. Few have beaten Saraland in the last five seasons as the Spartans have gone 62-9, the best record in Class 6A.
But there is another record some are pointing to as troubling — Kelly’s 1-5 record in state championship games. The coach himself has heard detractors jabber that he can’t win the biggest of big games. But take a closer look and you’ll see Kelly is earning his paycheck.
It can be argued that Saraland went to the state finals in 2022, 2023 and 2024 with what amounted to a homogenous team with the same core. Fair enough, although not completely true. But the Spartans also went in 2014 and 2018 with two rosters that had completely turned over. They went this year despite losing Williams to Alabama a year early.
In Kelly’s first appearance in a state championship game in 2009 with Jackson, the Aggies weren’t as good as undefeated Cherokee County but narrowly lost 31-27. Nobody else had come close to making it a one-score game against the Warriors.
In 2014, undefeated Clay-Chalkville was better than Saraland, yet the Spartans had a late lead before losing 36-31. The Cougars’ closest game up to then was 14 points.
In 2018, Pinson Valley and Bo Nix were better but Saraland trailed only 19-17 in the fourth quarter before losing 26-17.
In 2022, the Spartans were far superior to Mountain Brook and proved it resoundingly, 38-17.
The epic 2023 final with Clay-Chalkville could have gone either way. Saraland lost by a yard and three points, 31-28.
This year, Parker was the better team but the Spartans were in the game until the last 1:37.
Kelly has always handled the defeats and the victories with class. Without him, Saraland would not have played in five Super 7s. He’s a credit to the game, his school and the profession.
While they are not the greatest high school football team the state has ever seen, the Spartans are inarguably one of the most special. Their teams of the last three years have earned a place among the most preeminent teams in the state from the Mobile area, along with 1988 Vigor — still the best of all time in Alabama — the Blount teams of the 1990s, the mid-1980s Murphy teams, UMS-Wright from 2017-19 and St. Paul’s from 2014-17.
But there is a fraternity more important than that to Saraland’s players.
“Wearing the Saraland jersey is a privilege,” McWilliams said. Many players would love to have one. Machines wouldn’t care.
