California high school team’s offensive line rivals size of 49ers, Raiders
The Grant High (Sacramento, Cal.) offensive line weighs a ton. Well, close enough.
Grant's front five brings a hefty 1,560 pounds to the table, roughly the size of your average Holstein dairy cow. Where's the beef? Lining up in Sacramento every Friday night, apparently. Pacers coach Mike Alberghini, who has been the architect behind the state power's perennial dominance, keeps the food analogies going.
"We let the mascot go first when the linemen run out onto the field for games, carrying a pork chop," he joked to the Sacramento Bee. "The linemen look quick chasing him."
Senior left guard Shawn Matautia is the biggest of the bunch at 6-foot-4, 400 pounds. He's followed by junior left tackle Darrin Paulo (6-6, 320), sophomore right tackle Soape Tupou (6-4, 300), senior center Errick Dennis (6-3, 300) and relatively trim junior right guard Charles Bell (5-11, 240). None of them even played varsity football last season.
"That's a great line, the biggest in California," El Dorado Hills (Calif.) Oak Ridge coach Eric Cavaliere told the Bee, "and I'm talking USC, UCLA, Cal, Stanford, 49ers, Raiders."
Wait, is that true? It might be true. Let's check the scales. Grant's offensive line weighs an average of 312 pounds -- indeed bigger than UCLA (311), USC (298) and Stanford (297), and just barely shy of Cal (315), the Raiders (317) and 49ers (317). Yeah, they're big.
And they're not bad, either. The quintet blocks for an offense that is averaging 6.2 yards per carry on its march toward a record 23rd straight sectional playoff appearance. That streak isn't expected to end any time soon, either, since the Pacers feature five more linemen weighing more than 250 pounds, including 395-pound junior Keivoughn Redd.
It's unclear whether any all-you-can-eat restaurants in Sacramento are still in business.
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