Yodice: Class 6A football needs to find North-South balance

Let’s see, on the dawn of the 2025 prep football season, if I can’t stir the pot just a little. Or even a lot.

Here goes:

We need the South to have a big-school revival.

I said what I said.

Now permit me to spell it out.

The lines have always been drawn quite clearly, haven’t they, in New Mexico’s largest football classification. This was true when there were only four 11-Man classes, and it continues now, when there are five.

It’s that long-standing North vs. South narrative, which has been hammered home time and again through the decades. By fans, by communities, coaches and athletes, by journos like me. But it’s lost momentum.

The North, collectively, was on the short end of things for so long. SO. LONG. Go back to the origin of this multi classification setup, to the late 1960s.

The South, from 1969 until the middle of the 2010s, was the metaphorical, and literal, alpha.

Breeze through the 1970s. Sure, there was a Del Norte championship here, a Sandia title there, even a Santa Fe Demon blue trophy.

But the theme in that decade was largely southern in nature.

Eldorado once, and Highland twice, dotted the 1980s. The rest of that decade belonged to the Southern powers.

The entirety of the 1990s, with the exception of La Cueva’s championship team of 1992, was drenched in Southern flavor.

La Cueva won three state finals in the 2000s, including that spectacular 2004 undefeated squad that beat the soul out of everyone. The other seven seasons in that decade, the large division title was won by a southern school.

The tide began to change not long after Cleveland opened in 2009. The Storm — and rival Rio Rancho — each won a pair of championships from 2011-2016, all four of them undefeated teams. Manzano and Jordan Byrd won it all in 2017, La Cueva was tops in 2018, and Cleveland bagged a third crown in 2019.

The math had been reversed at last. The North had seven wins in the 2010s, the South just three.

And now here we are in 2025, and it’s been nine years since a non-metro team reached the final (Las Cruces in 2016) and 12 years since anyone from outside Albuquerque or Rio Rancho hoisted a blue trophy (Las Cruces in 2013).

I repeat: we need the South to rise again and win a championship to restore some of the passion and intensity to this regional conflict. We (I) have been sorely missing that type of unpredictable spice.

Cleveland, which has won state four times since 2019, surely doesn’t want this.

La Cueva, which has reached the final five times since 2017, probably ain’t too keen on this, either.

But we need it.

Cleveland and La Cueva don’t need it.

The rest of us need it. Even if you don’t know we need it.

The seesaw tilted one way for decades, now it tilts the other way. Surely there are folks who’d say that the South will just have to eat it now and learn to be on the short end, the same way the North had to for all that time. That’s understandable.

However, the North vs. South rivalry was not healthy when the Southern powers — Las Cruces, Mayfield, Clovis, Goddard, et al — were beating the proverbial crap out of the North year after year with not a whole lot of resistance. They were winning big, and regularly, in the regular season, and were proving largely unbeatable, if not untouchable, in November and December.

And, it’s not a terribly healthy dynamic today, with Cleveland and La Cueva, who have met in the last three 6A finals, lording their supremacy over everyone else while the chasing pack wonders if they’ll ever catch up.

We need more balance.

A rivalry, any rivalry in any sport, is most enjoyable when both sides are having regular success, when there is ebb and flow, when we begin a season and no one can say for sure whether we’ll have a Northern champion or a Southern champion.

We don’t have that.

As this season kicks off on Thursday night, there is Cleveland, standing tall as the Class 6A favorite.

And here we circle back to my opening.

The Southern presence has of late been most visible in Centennial and Las Cruces. But the giant wall they have to climb to get past Cleveland and La Cueva has proven to be insurmountable. (Sidebar: La Cueva strikes me as one of 6A’s most interesting teams this fall, and I’m keen to see how the Bears progress.)

This season, Las Cruces in particular could be that team to end the Northern string of championships. We will know much more about the legitimacy of their candidacy over the first four weeks, as the Bulldawgs take on Volcano Vista, Rio Rancho (a definite challenger), and then, finally, a road trip to Cleveland on Sept. 12.

Las Cruces and Mayfield for many years were the Cleveland and La Cueva of big-school football, deflecting Northern challengers left and right, often with ease and leaving Albuquerque’s schools, in particular, frustrated by their inability to break through.

This has for a few years been the trend for the Storm and Bears, as they swat away efforts by the Southern challengers to infiltrate their joint penthouse. And those same Albuquerque schools who hated being owned by the South then, are similarly distraught now by the gap that exists between them and the Cleveland/La Cueva pair. In this case, objects in the rear-view mirror are not really as close as they appear.

We’ll see how it plays out over the next 15 weeks, leading up to Nov. 29.

That’s in 101 days.

For now, let’s kick this thing off and have some fun. Three games in Albuquerque highlight opening night on Thursday. Good luck to one and all.

And with tongue firmly in cheek, and because I am in the mood to instigate, I close with this:

Go South go!