Bryan Moore spent last December on the sideline of the Class 7A state championship game, leading Opelika against powerhouse Thompson. Now the veteran coach is trying to bring that kind of big-game experience to Foley, a program he took over in January after Foley hired him away from Opelika.
Moore’s task is steep: helping the Lions climb into the upper tier of Alabama’s largest classification, newly renamed Class 6A after this year’s realignment folded the old Class 7A into a smaller number of top-tier schools. Speaking last week at Baldwin County High School’s Football Media Day, Moore made clear he understands both the opportunity and the challenge in front of him.
“I’m encouraged by what I’ve heard and the long-time vision of Foley or I wouldn’t be here,” Moore said. “I believe in it wholeheartedly.”
A Familiar Imbalance
For more than a decade, the state’s top classification has been dominated by schools in Region 2, centered on Central Alabama, and Region 3, centered on the Birmingham metro, while programs in Region 1 around Mobile and Region 4 around Huntsville have struggled to keep pace.
The numbers back up the perception. Over the 12 years the Alabama High School Athletic Association placed the top 32 teams in Class 7A, only one program from the Mobile or Huntsville areas won a state championship — McGill-Toolen, which beat Spain Park for the title in 2015. No team from Huntsville reached a 7A title game during that stretch, and McGill-Toolen itself lost in the championship game the other two times it advanced, both defeats to Hoover.
Moore, who has coached in North Alabama and most recently at Opelika, said he believes the gap comes down to resources.
“It’s the investment in football,” he said. “Go look at their places. Go to Trussville. See that place. See Hoover, what they have. See Thompson, what they have. Central, Opelika, Auburn. Ride through there. It’s like the SEC vs. the Group of 5. You are pouring money into it. You have really good players — homegrown, baseline talent — mixed with tradition and resources, and you get products like they are putting out there.”
Thompson, under coach Mark Freeman, has been the standard-bearer, winning six Class 7A titles over the past seven years. Hoover has won three during that broader era, and Central-Phenix City has added two. Add McGill-Toolen’s 2015 championship, and that accounts for essentially every state title in the classification.
“I would say they are like 10 years ahead,” Moore said of the Birmingham and Central Alabama programs. “I’ve seen it, lived it. I was there as an assistant and as a head coach. … I don’t mean it is going to take us 10 years to catch up. I just mean they are doing some of the things we are doing now long before us.”
Rebuilding a Foley Program Starved for Playoff Wins
Moore inherits a Foley program that has not won a playoff game since Todd Watson was head coach in 2014, and the Lions have reached the postseason only twice since then. A restructured playoff format could help change that. Class 6A is moving to a 24-team playoff bracket this season, with six teams advancing from each of the four regions instead of the traditional four.
“It allows more kids to have more of an experience,” Moore said of the expanded field. “What are we here to do? … It’s going to put more really good teams in the playoffs.”
Moore also said his early impressions of Region 1’s coaching ranks in Mobile and Baldwin County have been encouraging.
“I went to the region meeting right when I got here,” he said. “It was freezing cold, late January. I walked in that room and thought, ’Man, there are some good coaches here. There are some guys with state championship experience.’ It’s Baldwin County and Mobile trying to raise our level to compete with the Opelikas, Auburns and Centrals.”
Foley opens Moore’s first season as head coach on the road against McGill-Toolen on Aug. 21.
Moore’s arrival in Foley comes against the backdrop of a once-in-a-decade reshuffling of Alabama high school football. The AHSAA’s Central Board of Control, meeting at the association’s office on Feb. 6, 2026, approved a sweeping change to the way the state’s largest classification is governed: beginning with the 2026 season, public and private schools will be split into separate postseasons, and the seven-class structure that defined Alabama football for more than a decade will be reorganized. The top classification, formerly 7A, will now be called 6A, and its playoff field will be expanded from 16 teams to 24.
The change in playoff format is, in the AHSAA’s own description, a direct response to problems that had been building for years in the old 7A. Under the previous setup, only the top four teams in each of the four regions advanced to the postseason, leaving some highly ranked programs out of the bracket. According to Vestavia Hills coach Robert Evans, who helped lead the proposal effort, “the biggest problem, as we did the research, was that there were four top 25 teams in Alabama that didn’t make the playoffs last year and they were all in 7A.” In the new format, the top six teams in each of the four 6A regions will qualify. The first two rounds will be split into north and south matchups to limit travel costs, which had previously run as high as $20,000 for first-round trips when Mobile and Huntsville regions were crossed.
The public-private split is the underlying change that made all of this necessary. Once private schools are placed in their own postseason classifications — with their own four regions, their own brackets, and their own state championship games — the 7A tier of public schools becomes a smaller, more concentrated group, which in turn called for a smaller-but-deeper playoff structure. The AHSAA championship committee worked with 6A football coaches for months to design the new format, holding a meeting around the Super 7 to gather input before finalizing the model in early 2026.
Alabama’s largest classification has long been the province of a few well-resourced programs, almost all of them clustered in the state’s two largest population centers. Thompson, under coach Mark Freeman, has been the gold standard of the past decade, winning six Class 7A championships since 2019 — in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024, and 2025. Thompson’s 2025 title, a 48-10 win over Opelika, marked the program’s sixth blue map in seven seasons. Hoover, which posted eight 6A titles in the previous decade before moving up with the rest of the old 6A into the new 7A alignment in 2014, added 7A crowns in 2014, 2016, and 2017. Central-Phenix City, the eastern anchor of the so-called Central Alabama cluster, captured 7A titles in 2018 and 2023. McGill-Toolen’s 2015 win over Spain Park, the only championship in the past decade-plus for a program from outside the Birmingham–Central Alabama corridor, is the lone counterexample.
The dominance of those programs is part of why the new playoff format was approved, and part of what Moore is trying to change. Region 1, which includes Mobile and Baldwin County schools, and Region 4, anchored by Huntsville, have spent the better part of a generation trying to close the gap on Region 2 (Central Alabama) and Region 3 (Birmingham). Under the old 4-per-region format, only one Mobile-area team reached a Class 7A title game over the past decade-plus — McGill-Toolen in its other trips, both losses to Hoover. The expanded 24-team bracket now sends the top six from each region into the postseason, and gives the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in each region a first-round bye. That structure is intended, in part, to give programs like Foley the kind of early-round postseason experience that has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
Foley football has a championship pedigree of its own, even if the last decade has been lean. The Lions won a state title as recently as 2010, when they captured the 6A crown under then-coach Glenn Vickery, and have made playoff runs over the years that gave the program national attention. Since then, however, the gap between Foley’s resources and those of the top 6A/7A programs has widened, and the Lions have not won a playoff game since 2014. Moore inherits a roster, a coaching staff, and a community that have been waiting for the program to climb back into the upper tier of the classification.
The hire of Moore, who spent the 2024 season leading Opelika to the 7A state championship game before joining Foley, signals the kind of investment Foley believes is required to compete. The way Moore frames his task is in line with how other recent successful hires in the region have talked about their work: success at the top of the AHSAA’s largest classification depends on long-term commitment from the school, the community, and the booster club, not on a single talented senior class. The expanded playoff field will give Foley’s players more weeks of postseason experience than the program has had in years, but Moore has been clear that the broader goal is a level of week-in, week-out play that the program has not consistently produced.
The first test comes quickly. Foley’s 2026 regular season opens on the road against McGill-Toolen on Aug. 21, a matchup that places the Lions directly against the only Mobile-area program to have won a 7A title in the past 12 years. Games like that are part of why the Region 1 coaches’ meeting Moore attended in late January felt, in his words, like a room full of state championship experience. How Foley and the rest of Region 1 fare in 2026 will be one of the first measurements of whether the AHSAA’s new format is, as coaches hope, a step toward a more competitive top classification.