Current high school seniors were in first grade the last time Escalante and McCurdy played a competitive football game. And that year, they sure were competitive.
Eleven years ago, the Bobcats defeated Escalante in a 54-46 thriller to cap off a regular season where their only loss was a forfeit (state-mandated, the week after a brawl). Two weeks later, they met again in the state semifinals, McCurdy the No. 2 seed and Escalante No. 3. When McCurdy’s quarterback Eric Vigil aggravated a knee injury in warmups, he was unable to play. And Escalante came away with a 41-34 win on McCurdy’s field. The Lobos took a long touchdown drive in the fourth quarter, and later came away with an onside kick to seal the victory.
“It was definitely a tremendous atmosphere for the rivalry, something that you usually don’t see in Northern New Mexico football,” said Eric Vigil, father of the younger Eric and McCurdy’s coach at the time, now the athletic director at Mesa Vista.
A week later, the Lobos defeated Capitan for the state championship, their first in program history, and first of three in four years.
After a decade of Lobo dominance since then, the Bobcats appear ready to return the storied rivalry to its roots. The rivalry between the two teams has always been important for the players and the communities, and the resulting games have through history been tough fights for 50 years.
Throughout the years, Escalante would often come out on top in the end, but not without a hard battle from McCurdy. In attendance is always a rowdy crowd with an edge that can pop off at any time.
But in the last 10 years, the programs diverged. Escalante took off under coach Dusty Giles, winning state championships. McCurdy fell by the wayside, without a winning season since 2012, and had their program shut down before the 2019 season until 2021. The rivalry game has not been close since 2012.
This time, with the Bobcats cruising at 5-2 on the season, with a dominant rushing attack, they should have what it takes to push Escalante to the wire, and fans of both sides should have plenty to cheer for. Both team’s head coaches praised the other team, and are expecting a dogfight.
And this year’s matchup carries extra importance. The two teams are currently ranked: Escalante eighth and McCurdy ninth in the coaches’ poll, and flipped in the MaxPreps algorithm. Eight teams make the playoffs. The winner of this game could very well be the one that gets the final spot.
“I told the boys, I think it’s either us or them,” said Mel Martinez, McCurdy’s offensive coordinator.
For Martinez, the game has a bit of extra meaning. Martinez grew up in Tierra Amarilla, a mile away from the high school. In five years at Escalante, he played all over the field.
In his senior year, in 1997, the game was played with eight inches of snow in Tierra Amarilla, and they had to shovel off yard lines. Martinez caught a touchdown pass in a 20-6 win that day. Back then, they called themselves “School of Hard Knocks.” And really, not much has changed for the Escalante program over 30-plus years, always priding themselves on grit and aggressiveness.
“Not going to lie, I bleed red and black,” Martinez said. “But there’s nothing like coaching my son, and watching him excel in the sport he loves.”
A job in Los Alamos eventually moved Martinez south. But for his children, including Lucas — now the team’s star senior running back — he wanted the closest thing to the small school he attended. Something to which fans from both sides can relate.
“I came from a small school, so I wanted my kids to go to a small school,” he said. “I find a lot of good values coming from a small-school community where everybody knows everybody.”
Escalante commanded the matchup in the 1990s. Between 2001 and 2012, though, it was close almost every time they played. Rico DeYapp, now the head coach at Escalante, was a participant in many of those competitive games, in school from 2007-10, along with his receiver Eric Belser, now an assistant for the Lobos. McCurdy won nine of their 14 matchups in that stretch (including a forfeit in 2004 when Escalante canceled their season early), and they met in the playoffs two years in a row in 2011 and 2012.
“It’s a whole other game when Escalante and McCurdy played,” DeYapp said. “When I played ball at Escalante, that was the game.” DeYapp said he thought the game means even more to the community, especially up north, than it does to the players.
The 2012 games were perhaps when the rivalry peaked. The year before, McCurdy beat Escalante in a district quarterfinal game. Eric Vigil said that when his Bobcat team arrived at the field two hours before the district championship game, thousands of fans were already there. And while he said he did not directly see anyone exchanging money, he heard stories of supporters betting on the outcome.
“It was just a fun rivalry,” Vigil said.
In Vigil’s first year as coach, in 2001, he took a big lead, and tried to substitute in younger backup players. But he did not realize at the time the importance of the rivalry, what it meant to the players, and how long it had been since McCurdy won the game. Nobody wanted to leave the field.
Eventually, during his reign as head coach, he learned to set his first goal of the year to beat Escalante. Goals of winning the district and advancing through the state tournament progressed from there.
Since 2012 and when Vigil left, however, it has been a different story. The last eight matchups have all been Escalante, all by 40 points or more. Seven of the eight have been mercy-rule wins, six as shutouts. The average score: 55 to 2. Even last year, with McCurdy seemingly on the upswing and ready to compete, Escalante allowed zero points or first downs, scored 50, and ended the game with eight minutes remaining.
In fact, Escalante has beaten McCurdy in every varsity team sport — be it football, volleyball, boys or girls basketball — in every matchup since 2019. Current Bobcat seniors know only defeat since middle school.
Cecil Brown, a longtime McCurdy coach, currently an assistant, never played in the rivalry. When Brown played in high school, winning a state championship as a senior in 1962, there was no McCurdy vs. Escalante. There was no Escalante. The rivalry, Brown said, was with Chama High School — games with smaller Tierra Amarilla High School, with the two split at the time, were less competitive. Those two schools did not combine until later in the decade.
As a coach at McCurdy in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Brown faced off with Mel Martinez the player, something the two joke about now. In his years as head coach, Brown never defeated Escalante.
“Back in those days, you go out, and you’d fight hard,” Brown said. “You wanted to beat Escalante so bad. They had some really good players. You really had to prepare.”
Brown said coaching against Richard Atencio, Escalante’s leader at the time, was an extra challenge. Both sides, in fact, have had legendary coaches take on the rivalry.
“When he was coaching, I could not beat him,” Brown said. “I could play close. But I could not beat the guy. I don’t know how else I could put it, it was a war.”
This year, the game has once again become the talk of the town. Escalante assistant C.J. DeYapp and his mother run Henry’s True Value in Tierra Amarilla, and everyone who stops in mentions looking forward to the game.
“They’re going to give us all we want,” Rico DeYapp said. “It has been one sided. But when it’s Escalante and McCurdy, none of that s— matters.”