Allen faces Duncanville in the 2025 Texas high school state Class 6A Division I football semifinals on Saturday afternoon.
The game begins at 3 p.m. CST on Saturday, Dec. 13, at Mesquite Memorial Stadium.
The game will stream live on the NFHS Network.
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What: Texas’ University Interscholastic League (UIL) Class 6A Division I football semifinals
Who: Allen vs. Duncanville
When: Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025
Where: Mesquite Memorial Stadium
Time: 3 p.m. CST
Stream: NFHS Network
Record, MaxPrep state rankings: Allen 14-0, No. 2; Duncanville 11-1, No. 3
Here is a preview of the game from the Dallas Morning News, via the Tribune News Service:
Something’s missing in Allen’s celebratory team photo after the Eagles’ regional championship win over North Crowley. It’s hard to notice.
After every round of the Texas high school football playoffs, teams are rewarded with a golden football trophy with the round engraved on it to acknowledge their accomplishment.
Well, someone from Allen’s side forgot it, but you couldn’t tell by looking at the sea of smiles in the photo because it didn’t matter to anyone. It’d been a grueling week, and that gold ball was the last thing on anyone’s mind when the final whistle blew.
“We’re not thinking about a gold football. We can’t even keep our eyes open anymore,” Allen head coach Lee Wiginton said. “Every second of it is consumed to see what we can do to try to find a way to gain a yard or to slow down a yard.”
At that point, a 33-21 round four win over the reigning Class 6A Division I champion was the biggest sign Allen, a program once viewed as the perennial brand in Texas high school football, was rounding back into form.
And the coach to do it might be the one who does shirtless push-ups in the locker room to fire up his team.
“Our coach’s energy just put it all together,” senior linebacker Ja’Prei Wafer said.
This week, Allen’s returning to the state semifinals for the first time since 2018 to face Duncanville, the team that essentially ended its run of dominance. Since that loss, the list of area teams that have made runs beyond the regional final had grown, creating a narrative among Texas high school football circles that Allen had fallen behind the rest of the D-FW powers.
When he accepted the job in spring 2022, Wiginton called it “the greatest high school job in the country.”
But at the time, Allen hadn’t competed for a state championship in four seasons and had had its illustrious 84-game home win streak snapped by Humble Atascocita in dominating fashion, 41-20.
Fellow area Class 6A programs such as Duncanville, Cedar Hill, DeSoto, Denton Guyer and Southlake Carroll had all made a state championship appearance over that span. Allen hadn’t even won a regional title, and now the program was looking for its third head coach in as many seasons after former SMU and Arkansas head coach Chad Morris stepped down to return to the college ranks.
In stepped Wiginton, a 20-year coaching veteran who was the only coach then-4A Midlothian Heritage had ever known.
Allen’s previous hire, Morris, was two seasons removed from his tumultuous stint at Arkansas and had three state championships to his name, so the intrigue and prestige spoke for itself.
“Then they bring in Lee Wiginton, and nobody ever heard of that name in the history of the world,” Wiginton said. “And the kids are like, ‘What are we doing? Where’s the program gone? What’s happened here?’”
It turned out the only place the program was headed was back where it wanted to be, playing football in December. And all it took was a head coach who’d coached at nearly every level throughout his career — including stops at Bosqueville, Comfort and Mexia — except for the highest, Class 6A.
It didn’t start out perfect. In Wiginton’s first two seasons, Allen failed to win more than nine games for the first time since 2004 and 2005, Tom Westerberg’s first two seasons as head coach. After that happened, Westerberg helped lead Allen to the greatest run in the program’s history, with four state titles from 2008 to 2014.
“There was so much uncertainty (at Allen), and it would have been really easy for everything just to collapse,” Wiginton said. “It’s no shock to anyone that’s around it daily. But it’s so refreshing to see that good things happen to good people, because there are such incredibly good people here who work so hard every second, every day.”
Wiginton, or “Coach Wig,” took on arguably the biggest challenge of his career, stepping into a program where past success and stability created as big a pressure cooker as there is in Texas sports.
“There’s obviously a high standard,” senior receiver Carter Harris said. “We got the bar set high, just with all the state champions you have, we keep the standard set high so that we stick to it and win games like this.”
A big hurdle was cleared in making the state semifinals. But to truly restore order in Allen, the team needs to beat Duncanville on Saturday and resume its place among area 6A powers, avenging the 2018 loss.
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