COVER 3 – STATE CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION: Three athletes that stood out from the 2024 Class 6A State Championship Game

Our Cover 3 feature on FloridaHSFootball.com will be a complimentary part of our Daily Drive Podcast with Christopher Lyke that begins on January 2, 2025. In this year’s week-long state championship extravaganza at FIU’s Pitbull Stadium, the Class 6A State Championship, the West Boca Raton Bulls won their first state championship with a 26-7 victory over the Osceola Kowboys. West Boca finished the season with a perfect 15-0 record, filled with a roster almost filled with underclassmen. 

Here are three players we felt had a breakout performance in the game itself:

QB Mason Mallory – West Boca Raton

What we can say about the job Mason Malory did in a high-pressure setting is nothing short of spectacular. The junior quarterback threw for 147 yards on 6 of 11 passing. Two of those passes came in some of the most critical times of the game. A 47-yard pass to Mark Hanniford with 44 seconds left in the third to give West Boca a 19-7 lead, putting the Bulls up by more than one possession for the first time in the game. The other major play came when Osceola was striving to change the narrative with what would be a miraculous comeback. In the fourth quarter, Mallory threw a pass to Hanniford for a 93-yard touchdown that closed out the game’s scoring.

WR Mark Hanniford – West Boca Raton

Mark Hanniford was targeted by Mallory twice in the game and only caught two. They resulted in two of the most critical points of the game, and both resulted in touchdowns. Hanniford proves that the world expects you to deliver the goods when your number is called. His catches kept the momentum on the side of the Bulls. Much like that of Mallory and the majority of his team, Hanniford is just a junior and already has offers from UMass. Expect his recruiting to kick into full gear throughout the off-season. His state championship game was one of the best in all the games at FIU’s Pitbull Stadium.

DT Jamar Thompson – West Boca Raton

The West Boca Raton Bulls defense was the biggest benefactor of the 26-7 win over the Osceola Kowboys. If you are looking for a key defender to look at, Sophomore defensive tackle Jamar Thompson would be your best picture to paint in terms of how the game impacted the defensive side of the ball. With seven total tackles, it was clear that Thompson stopping the Kowboys down the middle was crucial to the game’s momentum. Of the seven tackles Thompson made, three of them came from behind the Kowboy line of scrimmage. Diving deeper into those three tackles for loss, one was a sack on Kowboys’ QB Henry Wolff.