Underdog Bellevue returns to 3A state championship sans 67-game win streak

A banner was strewn across a fence atop the rain-soaked steps that lead down to the football field at Bellevue High School on Tuesday. It read “The Wolverine Way. It’s worth the climb.”

Coach Butch Goncharoff said he hardly blinked when his Bellevue football team for the first time lost in a state championship last year, against Eastside Catholic.

Bellevue’s climb to a state-record 67-game win streak was gone. No more state-record six consecutive state titles and no more 12-0 record in state title games, either.

But Goncharoff?

“I never really took the streak serious,” he said. “Because it was a long way from 151.”

That was the nation-best streak Bob Ladouceur’s De La Salle (California) team strung before Bellevue ended it in in 2004.

“Knowing Bob Ladouceur as well as I do, that’s the bar for streaks in high school football,” Goncharoff said. “Once you get into the 100s or 130s, then you can start thinking, ‘Huh, well this is a streak.’ But I honestly didn’t know the number we were at, nor did I care.”

Even if others did.

“I do think the kids felt pressure to continue it and I think people around the community and other people were talking about it,” Goncharoff said. “But for us, we never took it that seriously. Nor did we really blink an eye when we didn’t continue it. It just wasn’t realistic. You are going to get beat.”

But No. 2 Bellevue climbed its way back into the 3A state title this season, where it gets a repeat against top-ranked defending state champ Eastside Catholic at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Tacoma Dome — its eighth consecutive trip to the state championship game and fourth in a row against Eastside Catholic.

“It’s interesting to be the team that is the underdog,” Goncharoff said. “Everybody’s going (Eastside Catholic)’s the new bully on the block. I think that’s a good thing for us. I’m excited about that.”

Bellevue’s done so amid controversy.

There was Goncharoff’s temporary suspension at the beginning of the season over recruiting, a trainer accused of intimidating a player, a private institution players attended that was labeled a “diploma mill” and this week another Seattle Times report saying Bellevue coaches wooed middle-school athletes from Tacoma and Spanaway among other locations. Longtime assistant coach Pat Jones wrote an August letter denying the program’s wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Bellevue still has a state championship game to prepare for.

And you’ll likely notice more passes from Bellevue’s vaunted wing-T.

Senior quarterback Justus Rogers has completed 54 of 85 passes for 1,104 yards with 18 touchdowns and one interception. The Washington State commit is also a running threat — he threw for 171 yards and ran for 104 in last week’s semifinal win over Bishop Blanchet.

So with Rogers, a smaller offensive line and a cast of lanky pass catchers, Goncharoff said this team became more of a passing team by necessity.

“We’ve always had the passing routes and concepts, but we’ve definitely never run them as much as we have this year,” Rogers said.

“It’s a little more advanced than last year, but still pretty basic concepts,” said Tyson Penn, an Oregon State commit who transferred from Federal Way two years ago. “But before I might get the ball about two times a game, and now I get the ball thrown to me about four or five times.”

Much of Bellevue’s spread passing concepts Goncharoff said he created out of a trip to the University of Oregon about five years ago.

“It has developed and it was ugly at times, but it helped us,” Goncharoff said. “Now you can’t just sit and defend us in what we do. So what has happened this year with the personnel we have, we are better at the spread than we are at the wing-T.”

Rogers said Bellevue formed a team motto in the offseason: BIB. It stands for Bring It Back.

“To win a state title this year, that would be awesome, more of a dream come true,” Rogers said. “Because that’s our tradition — winning championships. I’ve never won a state championship as the starting quarterback yet, so I might get really emotional afterward if we win. It’s a great opportunity.

“We tried to put last year in the past. You realize what happened and you move on and you try to stay positive because there’s already enough negativity going around with all the adversity we’ve faced as it is. … I think what people don’t realize is that the teams that have success like we do — it’s because of the work ethic at practice and our players growing up and believing.”

But if Bellevue doesn’t win, again, Goncharoff said you still won’t hear of any finger-pointing or table-pounding from him.

“It’s high school football. On a scale of importance it’s about a two,” Goncharoff said.

“You can’t control what other people think, what the community thinks, what the school thinks, what you guys (the media) think. You can only control what you do. And I think that is my philosophy — I’m going to control what I do, I’m going to control what the kids do and I don’t care about anything else. If you let it get bigger than it is, it can get overwhelming.”

This story was originally published December 3, 2015 at 10:49 PM with the headline "Underdog Bellevue returns to 3A state championship sans 67-game win streak."