Steel City Blitz
Welcome to WPIAL Championship weekend! The title games kick off with the 1A Championship at 11:00am on Saturday, November 22 at Heinz FieldAcrisure Stadium. The 2A Championship Game is scheduled for 2:00pm but logistically will start about a half hour after the 1A game ends. Seton LaSalle is back in the Championship Game for the second straight season. Steel Valley is making their 6th Championship Game appearance in the last decade. This is the second playoff meeting in two years for these teams after Seton beat Steel Valley in the semis last year.
Check out this week’s edition of the WPIAL Blitz Show where we previewed all of this week’s Championship Games!
Seton LaSalle is back in the Championship Game after coming up a touchdown short against South Park last year. The Rebels had to replace a number of starters from last year’s team. Their only loss came in Week 0 against 3A semifinalist North Catholic. Seton beat 1A semifinalist Bishop Canevin in Week 1 (who then turned around and beat Steel Valley the following week). The Rebels offense found their stride when they hit conference play and other than two 27-point outings against Washington, scored over 40 points in every game since Week 3. Seton started the playoffs with a dominant win over Mohawk then came from behind in the second half to beat conference rival Washington. The Rebels forced four second-half turnovers to keep the Prexies off the board and get back to the title game for the second straight season.
Steel Valley came into the season as one of the favorites but also had a slow start to the year. The Ironmen lost to Westinghouse in the KDKA Kickoff Classic then to Bishop Canevin in Week 2. In between, they did score a 21-6 win at Washington over the Little Prexies. A Week 6 hiccup against Apollo-Ridge where they lost on the final play of the game put Steel Valley’s conference title hopes in a precarious situation, but they came through with a dominant victory over unbeaten South Allegheny in the final week of the regular season to force a three-way tie atop the Allegheny Conference. Steel Valley won the three-way tie via tiebreaker points and was rewarded with a first round bye. They knocked off two teams from the Midwestern Conference (Ellwood City and conference champions Western Beaver) to get back to the finals. This was the third straight year that Steel Valley knocked Western Beaver out of the playoffs.
The only playoff meeting between these two teams came when Seton LaSalle knocked out Steel Valley in the semifinals last year. Seton won that game 27-13, slowing down Steel Valley’s high-powered rushing attack. Though they have only met in the playoff once, these two programs are very familiar with each other as they played in the same Century Conference in AA for a number of years.
Both of...
