One moment, Blake Nelson had the perfect angle to stop a bubble screen for a loss near the sideline. The next, he was laying on the turf, subject to the full Christian McCaffrey Experience.
“He put his outside foot in the ground, cut, and completely broke my ankles,” recalled Nelson, then Arapahoe’s star safety. “I ended up falling down, rolled over, and watched him run away from the rest of our defense for a touchdown. I had never experienced something like that.
“He was like when you make one of those custom Madden players and you turn all their attributes all the way up. That’s what it felt like to play against him. And I look back at that game and think, ‘What could we have done to stop him?’ Nothing. He was a freak back then and now he’s doing the same thing to NFL defenses.”
That’s just one tableau of many from McCaffrey’s storied prep days at Valor Christian from 2010 to ’13 when the dynamic running back and Colorado native was the centerpiece of four straight state title teams.
As the San Francisco 49ers star prepares to face the Kansas City Chiefs in Sunday’s Super Bowl, the players and coaches who tried to stop McCaffrey during his Colorado prep days now speak with reverence about the time they shared a field with the future All-Pro. For many, it represents a brush with athletic greatness they’ll never forget. For others, it stands as the most frustrating 48 minutes of their careers.
One thing just about all of them agree on: McCaffrey, at his best, was “untackleable.”
“He wasn’t a guy who could be wrangled,” said Pine Creek coach Todd Miller, whose Eagles were blown out by McCaffrey & Co. in the 2011 Class 4A championship. “He avoided contact and then when he did get in contact, he was impossible to get down on the ground.”
Bursting onto the scene
The same attributes that made McCaffrey a Heisman Trophy finalist at Stanford and three-time Pro Bowler in the NFL were evident early on at Valor Christian. Long before those accolades, McCaffrey was torching the Colorado high school scene with a generational combination of speed, vision, balance and strength.
It didn’t take long for him to make an impact. After recording his first high school touchdown on a 30-yard scoop-and-score in his second game as a freshman, he had his first 100-yard rushing game against Rock Canyon in Week 6.
The next game, McCaffrey ran for 188 yards and five touchdowns on eight carries against Castle View, the first of five times then-Sabercats head coach Ryan Hollingshead got a taste of the tailback’s incredible talent.
“I remember in that moment thinking, ‘This is the best high school player I’ve ever seen,’ and he was 14 years old,” Hollingshead said. “I’ve never seen a player who could cut and accelerate to full speed like he did. That first game, it was a lot of outside zone, cut back all the way across the field, and make everybody look funny. Even as a freshman, he always had that one extra gear and he would destroy the best pursuit angles in two steps.”
As a sophomore, he ran for the first of three 1,000-yard seasons and culminated the year with his first jaw-dropping playoff performance: 312 total yards and four touchdowns in Valor Christian’s 66-10 pummeling of Pine Creek in the Class 4A championship,
As he took over the game in the first half, the Pine Creek staff implemented a unique strategy to try, in vain, to prevent further gashings.
“In the second quarter, we told our safeties, ‘As soon as the ball is snapped, guess (on your read), and run as fast as you can to the alley where you think he’s going to be,'” said Miller, the Pine Creek coach. “McCaffrey still outran our guys two times for long touchdown runs, even when our safeties cheated and guessed right. I had never seen that before.”
McCaffrey’s local stardom came into full bloom as a junior, when the Eagles moved up to Class 5A.
In the aforementioned game against Arapahoe where McCaffrey left Nelson tackling air, the tailback turned in the top statistical performance of his prep career with 403 total yards and six touchdowns as Valor Christian blasted the Warriors 49-18 in the state quarterfinals.
By then, everyone knew about McCaffrey’s speed and shiftiness in open space. But what stood out to then-Arapahoe coach Mike Campbell most was his power running, a feature that later came into focus in college and now the NFL.
“Until I saw him that day, I don’t think I could ever believe how physical he ran between the tackles,” Campbell said. “A lot of times you see a guy with that kind of juice, and they don’t really drive it down your throat in the A and B gaps. But where my respect was the greatest for him came from seeing him in head-to-head collisions with linebackers. He was never afraid to pump it inside, and he was just as hard to tackle there.”
Even in one of McCaffrey’s more vanilla performances of his prep career — the state championship that season against Cherokee Trail — he found a way to tilt the scales in favor of Valor Christian.
The Eagles were tied 0-0 heading into the fourth quarter of the Class 5A championship in a game that saw McCaffrey grind out 126 yards on 28 carries. Valor Christian’s dynasty was teetering in the balance as a tough Cherokee Trail defense, headlined by future NFL linebacker Jacob Martin, gave McCaffrey’s offense its stiffest test of the season.
But leave it to McCaffrey — who also played cornerback, returner and punter — to deliver the key special teams play that helped propel the Eagles to a hard-fought 9-0 victory.
“Christian did a rugby punt from about midfield,” then-Cherokee Trail head coach Monte Thelen recalled. “We thought it was some type of fake, and our returners came up to play defense. He let off a beautiful 46-yard punt that rolled down to about the 3-yard line. That was really a deciding play in terms of the field position battle, because then in the fourth quarter, they scored a TD and a field goal.”
An unstoppable senior
By the time he was a senior, the McCaffrey hype reached a crescendo as he continued to deliver running behind an enormous, Division I prospect-laden offensive line that rivaled the size of the Broncos’ front.
He had 10 games with 100-plus yards rushing that season, including three above 200 yards. His rushing high came against Columbine in the state quarterfinals, a 49-13 Valor Christian win in which McCaffrey triggered the first and only mercy rule of head coach Andy Lowry’s 30-year tenure with the Rebels. McCaffrey piled up 272 yards and three touchdowns on just 15 carries.
“McCaffrey could’ve had 400 yards rushing in that game,” Lowry said. “They just kind of messed around a little bit on first and second down, and then on third down they’d finally give him the ball and he’d rip one off. He did whatever he wanted to us.
“When they finally hit the mercy rule, I thought it was the greatest rule ever. I just wanted to get out of there. It put us out of our misery. Only a couple years later did I feel a little bit better about that, after he did it to USC and UCLA and the whole Pac-12.”
In McCaffrey’s final high school game, he destroyed Fairview with 221 total yards and four touchdowns as the Eagles rolled to a 56-16 win. As then-Fairview linebacker Dan Hoskins explained, “When he got the ball, it seemed like everybody else was in slow motion.”
Even the Knights’ half-baked scheme to intentionally risk drawing penalties over allowing McCaffrey to break a big play couldn’t contain him.
“Our coaches told us, if you see him run out on a slip screen — which they had been using to get him huge gains all season — just tackle him, whether he has the ball or not,” recalled Connor Spencer, who was a senior defensive lineman for Fairview. “Technically, that’s defensive holding, but we figured it would be 50/50 odds of it getting called. I did get called for it during the game. … And even when I did (hold him), he still caught the ball, even as I was tackling him.”
Seeds of a national sensation
When McCaffrey got to Stanford, stories of his high school dominance only became amplified.
But even with the skyrocketing fame and recognition that came with being a Heisman Trophy finalist, he remained the same hungry, chip-on-the-shoulder player he was as a freshman at Valor Christian.
Brent Vieselmeyer, who was Valor Christian’s head coach for McCaffrey’s freshman through junior seasons, recalled the hyper-dedication that turned McCaffrey from a relatively skinny high school prospect into the bulked-out tailback who will take the field Sunday in Las Vegas.
“He’s shown consistent discipline over a long, long time,” Vieselmeyer said. “Even at Valor, we would try to get him to relax a little bit as far as taking time off. He’d call and be like, ‘Coach I’m on vacation, but I did 500 push-ups on the beach.’ I would be, ‘Um, OK, stop that.'”
McCaffrey paired that intensity with a humble style of play, even amid his routine domination that led to at least one TD in 52 of his 55 career games.
In an era when the vitriol toward Valor Christian was at an all-time high, McCaffrey’s personality and complete lack of trash talk between the lines endeared him to the coaches and teams he beat.
“He was head-and-shoulders better than everybody on that field, but you wouldn’t know it by the way he acted,” Miller said. “He was quiet, businesslike. He’d have a big run, flip the ball to the ref, jog back to the huddle and do it again. That’s what frustrated you. You wanted to dislike him, but you couldn’t, because the way you’d want your son to play the game, he did it.”
In McCaffrey’s case, son was very much like dad.
Ed McCaffrey’s powerful but understated game as a 13-year NFL wide receiver produced one Super Bowl title with San Francisco and two with Denver. Christian’s mom, Lisa, was a standout track athlete and soccer player, while his grandfather Dave Sime won a silver medal in the 100-meter dash at the 1960 Olympics.
That storied athletic lineage was evident in the tailback’s days at Valor Christian — and even years before that.
“One thing that really stuck out was his running form,” said Hoskins, the former Fairview linebacker. “Me and my teammates thought he had probably gone through intense running training. It looked so clean and immaculate. But obviously, a lot of that is from the crib.”
McCaffrey’s sensationalism in high school wasn’t news to those who knew him best. This was, after all, the player who as a 7-year-old produced his first highlight-reel TD in a halftime game at the Broncos’ stadium against NFL mascots in 2003.
“You knew even at that young age how good he was, and his unique knack as a football player,” explained Austin Smith, McCaffrey’s teammate on the Douglas County Dolphins, a squad where the tailback played two years up. “That highlight of him scoring a touchdown (on a reverse) against the mascots at Mile High Stadium, that was an omen.
“You knew from a very young age that he was a rare talent. And even then, we knew that Christian was always the one we should try to get the ball to. Just like his whole career, in that game and on our team he was never the biggest guy out there, but that play showed that his instincts and his knack for football are unparalleled.”
McCaffrey’s Colorado legacy
Now, all that promise has bloomed into reality in the NFL.
After being drafted eighth overall by the Panthers in 2017, McCaffrey made his first Pro Bowl in 2019 while becoming one of three players ever to record 1,000 yards rushing and 1,000 yards receiving in the same season.
Carolina traded him to San Francisco in 2022. In the time since, he made two more Pro Bowls while also becoming the league’s highest-paid running back with an average annual salary of $16.02 million. He turned in an MVP-caliber season this year while capturing the NFL’s rushing title with 1,459 yards to help lead the 49ers to the Super Bowl.
For most Colorado football diehards it’s a resume that, along with McCaffrey’s accomplishments at Valor Christian, puts him at the top of the list of the most extraordinary Colorado high school football players ever.
With four state titles, two state Gatorade Player of the Year trophies and the Gold Helmet Award — in addition to astounding statistical tallies that litter the state record book such as 8,815 total yards and 141 offensive TDs — the legend of McCaffrey’s dominance at Valor Christian is only sure to keep growing.
“There’s been some great players to come out of this state — guys like (Wheat Ridge’s) Freddie Steinmark and Dave Logan, (Cherry Creek’s) Darnell McDonald, (Denver South and Chatfield’s) LenDale White,” said Campbell, the former Arapahoe coach. “But it’s a really easy argument to make that McCaffrey is the greatest high school player in the history of the state, and I don’t think anybody else on that shortlist could take offense to that.”
Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.