LAREDO — Mission High junior quarterback Jeremy Duran has been named The Monitor’s Player of the Week for the area round of the Texas high school football playoffs.
Duran led the Eagles against Laredo United South in The Monitor’s Game of the Week and an area-round matchup in the Class 6A Division I playoffs Friday in Laredo, where Mission ultimately fell to the Panthers 42-41 in overtime.
The Eagles’ junior gunslinger threw for 294 yards and two passing touchdowns, including a 61-yard bomb to senior wideout Joe Louis Cortez, on 23-of-39 passing.
Duran also added four rushing touchdowns, including one in overtime to keep Mission’s postseason hopes alive, on eight carries for 35 yards.
Duran’s overtime touchdown, a 1-yard QB scramble on fourth-and-goal, gave the Eagles a shot to tie and prolong the game. Duran and Mission High head coach Koy Detmer, however, said after the game that the team had already made up its mind before overtime began that the Eagles would go for the two-point conversion and the win instead.
The Eagles’ two-point conversion pass was deflected by a Panthers defender in the end zone to end Mission’s season at 5-2 and advance Laredo United South to the 6A DI regional semifinals.
“We played our hearts out,” Duran said Friday night. “It was just a shootout kind of game. Our coach believed in us and we believed in ourselves to win it at the last second and we just came up short.”
The Mission High quarterback ends his junior season with 1,799 passing yards, 25 total touchdowns and a 60.5% completion rate. Duran led all Class 6A football players across the Rio Grande Valley in each of those three categories during the 2020 season.
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