Lockwood vs King Street, Lion vs Husky, Oviedo vs Hagerty, a rivalry marked by five-star athletes, first-round picks, and a town split in two.

This week the hate gets renewed for its 19th edition when the 4-1 Lions face the 4-2 Huskies. While the rivalry is short in years only beginning in 2007, the amount of history tucked into the 18-year rivalry is beyond belief. 

While the two rivals were founded in the same town just under six miles from each other,  their history couldn’t be any different. Oviedo High School was founded in 1922 and just two years ago, celebrated its 100th anniversary, while Hagerty was founded in 2005 just nineteen short years ago due to an influx of students at Oviedo High.

The Lions dominated on the pair’s first date, beating the newborn Huskies program 48-7. However, the Huskies did not allow the blowout loss to intimidate them as the very next season the budding Husky program would get their first win over the struggling Lions 35-28. The Lions finished that season 3-8 marking one of the worst seasons in the long-tenured program’s history.

The Lions would see a massive turnaround in the 09 season, when superstar quarterback and future first-round draft pick Blake Bortles led the Lions to a 9-2 season, torching the Huskies 55-14. Bortles is well known around Oviedo as the greatest player to ever come out of the area, Leading his hometown UCF Knights to a 12-1 record and a victory in the 2013 Fiesta Bowl over the 16.5 favorite Baylor Bears. Bortles would later become the only NFL player in Oviedo High School history when the Jacksonville Jaguars drafted him in the first round of the 2014 NFL draft with the third overall selection. 

Although Bortles would enjoy much success in the coming years, his alma mater could not say the same. The trend set by Bortles in the rivalry would not continue as Bortles’ graduation would leave the Lions vulnerable in the 2010 season, suffering their second loss in the rivalry in five years, 30-27. The Huskies, of course, were led by their own new hotshot quarterback, Jeff Driskel. Driskel would take the world by storm in his senior season, leading an undermanned Huskies squad to their first winning season in program history and the school’s first-ever playoff appearance. Driskel would put up more than impressive numbers in his senior season, scoring 39 touchdowns along with his 3079 total yards, school records that remain unbroken to this day. 

After Driskels heroic senior season, he would experience a bit of a rollercoaster of a career. After failing to live up to his five-star expectations at the University of Florida, Driskel would transfer to Louisiana Tech where he would find moderate success and eventually flip that success into a solid eight-year career as a journeyman backup quarterback. 

After Driskel’s senior season, Hagerty would again hit a skid in the rivalry, dropping five straight to the Lions in a very dark time for the Hagerty football program. The Huskies would win just 23 games from 2011-2016 but would finally see their luck turn around in the 2017 season. 

The Huskies would not only get their third win over the Lions, but they would also make only their third-ever playoff appearance but would again fall short of a playoff victory, giving them a lackluster 0-3 record in the playoffs over their first decade. 

The next decade has yet to yield the success that the Huskies had once looked destined for, as they’ve been pushed to the role of little brother in the rivalry dropping eight straight to the Lions giving them a record of three wins and a staggering fifteen losses. The closest the Lions have come to dropping their win streak of seven years was in 2022 in what was widely considered to be the biggest matchup of the rivalry’s history.

Going into the game, both teams held a record of 8-1 and were seen by most as completely even talent-wise. The Lions prevailed 26-18 in a game that remained tight all the way down to the wire. All though on paper the rivals were equal there was one big difference between the two, coaching. 

Oviedo head coach Greg Odierno has taken the rivalry seriously since his first day on campus and this can be seen through his results on the field. Odierno holds a 3-0 record against the Huskies, while also holding an average margin of victory of 23.6 points. Odierno knows what the rivalry means to the town of Oviedo and proves it year after year. 

Hagerty’s misery is likely to continue through the season as one of Coach O’s most talented squads makes the six mile trek to Lockwood as heavy favorites, as the Lions, ranked 78th in the state of Florida, take on the 193rd ranked Huskies once more.