Flower Mound will represent District 6-5A in next week’s Class 5A playoffs. But they didn’t get in quite the way they had hoped.

    The Jaguars (6-4 overall, 2-3 in district play) lost 45-24 to Coppell (9-1, 4-1) on Friday – closing out the season with back-to-back lopsided losses. Yet they secured the fourth and final playoff spot thanks to Marcus’ 35-28 win over Hebron in their season finale. A Hebron win would have eliminated the Jags.

    “There wasn’t a single football prognosticator that picked us to win more than three games before this season even started, and here we are going to the 5A playoffs,” Flower Mound head coach Cody Vanderford said. “We are a young team, but we grew up a lot from last week and this is a huge deal for us.”

    Flower Mound joins Southlake Carroll, Coppell and Marcus as 6-5A’s representatives. The Jags will meet Euless Trinity at 11 a.m. on Saturday at Cowboys’ Stadium in Arlington. This is Flower Mound’s first playoff appearance since 2007, but they head in having lost their last two games.

    This Saturday’s game will feature Trinity – the No. 6 ranked team in 5A – against the No. 12 team in Flower Mound. Trinity wrapped up the regular season 8-2 and finished district play 7-0 with a 62-17 win over L.D. Bell on Friday.

    For Flower Mound, the key to Friday’s game proved to be at the end of the first half as the Cowboys scored twice in the final two minutes, 21 seconds of the second quarter. Flower Mound led 17-10 with 4:08 remaining in the half but failed on a fourth down and one play at the Coppell 40-yard line. The Cowboys scored four plays later to tie. On the first play of the Jaguars’ ensuing possession, Coppell’s Brandon Mullins intercepted Paul Millard – setting up a four-play touchdown drive capped by quarterback Hayden Hawk’s five-yard strike to Jeff Johnson. Coppell never lost the lead again.

    “We had too many turnovers, and you can’t do that against a team like that,” Vanderford said.

    Hawk completed 23 of his 31 attempts for 361 yards and five touchdowns. Running back Cam McDaniel started slow but ended up shredding the Jaguar defense for 99 yards on nine carries.

    Coppell used that first half momentum to dominate the second half. Hawk led the team on a nine-play drive that spanned 95 yards to start the third quarter and capped it with a 36-yard pass to Taylor Goebel. By the end of the third, Coppell had added another touchdown for a 38-17 lead.

    Flower Mound, to its credit, continued to move the chains all night. But when faced with fourth down and short plays with 4:30 left in the third and again with 2:41 remaining in the same quarter, they simply couldn’t convert.

    The loss spoiled a night in which Millard threw for 426 yards. He even started the game on a 10-for-10 clip, leading the Jags on an 11-play, 84-yard touchdown drive capped with his four-yard toss to Josh Brake. Millard completed his first 17 passes of the game before throwing an incompletion with 2:55 left in the opening quarter.

    Yet by game’s end, the Coppell defense managed to intercept him three times, including twice in the first half alone. After so many first half fireworks, the Jaguar offense scored just once on six second half possessions.
 

   “I told the kids that three of our losses this season were to 9-1 teams, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of at all,” Vanderford said. “There aren’t many teams that get the chance to play next week, but we are getting that chance. And we’ll see what happens next.