The critique of Grant Gunnell’s game has always been that he isn’t playing against a high enough threshold of competition to be considered among the state’s top quarterbacks.
Whatever you may think about how his level of competition bodes for his present or future, however, Gunnell is now alone atop the record books in the state most synonymous with high school football.
Friday night, the St. Pius X (Houston) senior became the all-time leader in career passing yards in Texas high school football.
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In a home game against Concordia Lutheran High School (Tomball, Texas), the Arizona commit Gunnell brought his career yardage total to 14,577 yards. According to the Houston Chronicle, that passes the 14,408 set in the 2011-2014 campaigns from Booker (Texas) High’s Hunter Lile.
The 6-foot-6, 222-pound Gunnell finished 21 of 31 for 487 yards and five touchdowns in the 34-14 win.
A varsity player since 2015, Gunnell now has 179 career touchdown passes as well. He is now just eight away from breaking the record of 186, owned by Refugio (Texas) High’s Travis Quintanilla, who set the record between 2010 and 2013.
Consider that the young men whose records Gunnell is surpassing were not getting Div. I looks. Not only is Gunnell an FBS level quarterback, he has chosen Arizona from 41 scholarship offers that included powerhouses Alabama and Ohio State, to name a couple of the household variety. Gunnell had originally committed to Kevin Sumlin and Texas A&M, but has now chosen to follow Sumlin to Tucson.
St. Pius X, meanwhile, has two more regular season games plus the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools playoffs for Gunnell to further distance himself from others in the state record books. Before he is a Wildcat in the desert, Gunnell will have authored one of the greatest high school careers in American’s premier prep football state.
No small task, that.