So much success already has taken place for Bingham’s Brayden Cosper.
Friday’s Class 6A championship in football was the second for the elite wide receiving tandem. And the pair also been on a pair of state basketball championship teams, including as starters last year.
So the question posed for Miners football coach John Lambourne after his team’s 27-14 win over East was: Is it the program that’s making the players stand out or is it the players — specifically Cosper and Milne — who are making the program so good?
“It’s both. Absolutely,” Lambourne said. “They’re terrific football players, terrific kids. They put it on the line when they need to. I can’t say enough about those boys.”
Cosper, who has committed to play football at BYU, helped loosen up the Leopards’ defense by grabbing a 30-yard pass from Ryan Wood late in the second quarter of a 7-7 game. Cosper’s catch put the ball at the 5, and Bingham scored on the next play, a run by Braedon Wissler, with 58 seconds left before intermission.
“You have to have a lot of patience,” Cosper said. “You have to know what the team’s all about and what you’ve been doing all season. You’ve got to stick with it because that’s what got us here.”
Milne has college offers to play football at Weber State, Army and Air Force. His first look at a pass came on an out route in the third quarter.
“Obviously I’m trying to get the ball,” Milne said. “But I know what this team’s about and what we need to do to win. Early on, we talked about what they were doing, and we had to adjust to their defense.”
Milne set up a touchdown at the beginning of the fourth quarter in almost identical fashion as his teammate. He caught a 23-yard pass that immediately led to a 5-yard run by Wood for a 27-7 lead.
“Having Dax and Cosper out there, they draw the attention. It’s four-on-two basically, so we gain numbers in the front,” Lambourne said about his receivers’ ability to take defenders away from the box.
If there was any doubt about the importance of this pair to the team’s overall success, one only needed to look at the two at the end of the game.
Cosper and Milne were at defensive positions in the secondary as the seconds ticked off. The pair were used extensively on both sides of the ball in Bingham’s championship campaign.
“I love locking people down,” Milne said. “I love not letting anybody get anything. We played a lot of defense this year. We haven’t done that in the past years, but we started it and it’s worked out.”