2026 Football Preview: MVP

The Mountain View Prep Stars are in year three of their existence not just as a football program, but as a school. That hasn’t stopped the Stars led by Grey Ramsey from being one of the best programs in the upstate sporting a 22-3 record across 2024 and 2025. Even with a new region and a lot of new faces Coach Ramsey is setting the bar high for his third year as a head coach. “We want to have this opportunity to have such high expectations…and building this program from the ground up it’s been a lot of fun for us and we take a lot of pride in it.” Coach Ramsey said. With the schedule they’ve put together for 2026 they’re certainly going to have those opportunities.

A season ago MVP was led by one of the top QBs in the state with Makorean Anderson putting up 51 touchdowns, with nearly four thousand yards of total offense, then on July 4th the quarterback announced that he would be transferring to Christ School in North Carolina. “We were very fortunate that we had another player on the roster that had QB experience and Jacoby Kelly is going to be stepping into that starter role for us.” Coach Ramsey tells me. Kelly was the starting quarterback for the junior varsity team in 2025 and figures to be relying on a veteran supporting cast on offense. 

MVP returns two of their top receivers from a year ago in Chase Richards and Savion Booker as well as all five of their starting offensive linemen up front. At running back they lose Dylan McKey after leading the team in rushing at the position and Coach Ramsey sees a by committee approach. “We’ve got four guys that we feel really good about at the position and that allows us at any given time to run out different personnel groups.” Ramsey says. MVP has scored over five hundred points in both of their seasons up to this point and despite a first-time varsity starter at QB Coach Ramsey sees the veteran leadership from the rest of the offense as a huge boost to not only Kelly but the whole team.

As opposed to an offense that is returning a wealth of experience, the defensive side of the ball for MVP is losing their top five tacklers from 2025. Ramsey credits new defensive coordinator Stanley Hunter Jr. in transforming this side of the ball in such a short amount of time. “Compared to the offense we feel like we still have some depth on the defensive side of the ball especially at linebacker and that’s rare at our level and our classification.” Says Ramsey. The leader of that defense right now is rising sophomore linebacker Jamar Brown who had 29 tackles, 8 tackles for loss, and 7 sacks as a freshman. “Jamar is going to be a huge piece…he’s a powerful guy that everyone in the country will be after by the time he becomes a senior.” said Ramsey. 

Brown is the middle of MVP’s best position group on defense with TL Hanna transfer Elijah Grimes and senior Cliff McDaniel being the other top names at linebacker but the return of David Lewis and Lawson Burrell from injury and transfer rules respectively gives the Stars a boost on the defensive line that forms one of the top front sevens in the region. “To be able to have guys up front that are putting pressure on quarterbacks and stopping the run makes their job easier in coverage in the back end.” Lewis had 2 sacks and 13 QB hurries in just five games before his injury and McDaniel at linebacker was the third leading sacks getter on the entire team in 2025. In that back end Ramsey admits they lack the experience but notes that, in his opinion, it is the most athletic they’ve ever been. “In 13 years of coaching football I don’t know if I’ve ever been around a faster defense.” Says Ramsey.

On the schedule front MVP finds themselves in Region 2 2A under the new SCHSL alignment but before they can even get to that they have to get through a non-region schedule that begins with a home game vs Ambassador Christian (Huntersville, NC) and then three straight road games at Charlotte Country Day School (Charlotte, NC), May River, and Gray Collegiate. MVP wraps up the non-region schedule with a home game against St. Joseph’s Catholic, one of their old region mates from last year. “I really want our kids to be prepared and I learned from working under Coach Hodge at Spartanburg that the best way to do that is to play a very tough non-region schedule and we’ve got that chance.” Coach Ramsey says about the early goings of the schedule.

The region schedule begins with a home date against Chesnee then two straight road games at Landrum and Clinton before ending the regular season with a home tilt with Woodruff and a road trip to Southside Christian. Mountain View Prep exists in a weird place where they really don’t have “home” games, they play their home at North Greenville University, which is around a forty-minute drive from campus, but Coach Ramsey sees that as a rallying cry for the Stars. “We’re a bunch of sandlot kids, we don’t care where we play, don’t care how it looks if you give us a field that’s painted, you spot the ball and we play and so I think that has shaped our kids’ mentalities.” After making the upper state title game in year one and the third round in year two Mountain View has established lofty expectations in a short time for their football team in 2026 and beyond but that’s just how they want it to be.