Well, here's a little something the rest of the state probably doesn't know. If they beat Pflugerville on Saturday night in the Class 5A Division II championship game, the Katy Tigers will have the same number of titles -- four -- in the past decade as the Carroll Dragons.
That fact, though, is probably lost on most Katy fans and players, who apparently don't suffer from Carroll envy.
"These kids at Katy, I don't think they're starving for attention," said Charles Cooper, a Katy lifer who played for the Tigers in the 1960s. "They just kind of mind their business."
Cooper, a 62-year-old retired Exxon employee in this suburb west of Houston, says that mentality comes from Katy's only two head coaches in the past 25 years.
Mike Johnston, whose 21-year Katy head coaching stint ended with the 16-15 victory against Carroll in the 2003 5A Division II title game, is credited with building a program that has made 21 playoff appearances in 23 seasons.
Gary Joseph, one of Johnston's assistants all those years, gets credit for sustaining it. He's looking for his first title as a head coach after the Tigers lost to Carroll 34-20 in the 5A Division II title game two years ago.
"Those two guys, both of them are really, really special individuals," said Rob Peters, a former Texas Tech quarterback who was the senior starter in 1994 when the Tigers made their first trip to the state finals since 1959. "The stability they've been able to give the program, in my opinion, is the big reason why Katy has been able to sustain a high level."
Johnston almost didn't get to stick around long enough to do anything in Katy. After two years as assistant, he took over as head coach in 1982. Four seasons later, he had an 8-32 record and no playoff appearances.
The administration stuck with him, though, and the first of several breakthroughs came in 1986. The Tigers went 10-0 before losing in the first round of the playoffs. Three years later, they finally won a playoff game again, and three more years after that, they went four rounds deep.
After Peters led Katy to the finals in 1994 (a 28-7 loss to Plano), the Tigers waited another three years for the biggest breakthrough -- a 24-7 victory against Longview for their first state title since '59, when Katy was a small oil and ranching town that hadn't been swallowed by urban sprawl.
Now Katy is preparing for its sixth championship game since '97 and it could have been more.
In 1998, Katy was kicked out of the playoffs the day before a championship game when it found out a seldom-used reserve had falsified his grade report. Three years later, the Tigers lost in the second round to Houston Madison, which had some quarterback named Vince Young.
"I think the experience of being there made a big difference," Peters said. "I think it's the mind-set of going from it's a really big deal to make the playoffs to being a big deal to win a playoff game and advance."
The formula Johnston used was familiar: hard work, discipline and accountability. There weren't many star players mixed in.
Johnston says Peters was about the best player he coached, and Peters sees himself as the answer to another trivia question: Who was the last Texas Tech quarterback who didn't pass? Peters' final year at Tech was the season before Mike Leach brought in the nation's most prolific passing offense.
When he faced the state's most famous high school offense against Carroll, Johnston didn't kid himself. He knew his only chance was to keep the ball with an old-fashioned power running game. It worked, and the Tigers beat Dragons quarterback Chase Daniel, a Heisman Trophy finalist at Missouri this year.
"We just didn't have the athletes they did," said Johnston, now the head coach at Houston Christian. "I told our coaches, 'It might be ugly football, but we're looking for it to be effective.' We were not going to sit there and play that kind of game."
Things have changed a little under Joseph.
Although running back Aundre Dean is a big threat with 2,277 rushing yards and 25 touchdowns, quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell has thrown 34 TD passes. The athletes aren't exactly shabby, either. Five Katy players have already committed to Division I schools, including Mitchell to Hawaii, which passed its way into the Sugar Bowl with record-setting QB Colt Brennan.
A win Saturday night would be the 105th this decade for the Tigers -- an average of 13 per season and just four fewer than the Dragons.
Oops. More Carroll comparisons. The Tigers just aren't into that.
"If they're fortunate enough to win Saturday night and go 16-0, they might be the best Katy team ever, but none of them will come out and be that boastful," Johnston said. "That kind of reflects the spirit of the community and school. It's more a thing of thankfulness for the opportunity."
If so, the Katy Tigers have a decade full of thanks.
