FOLSOM, Calif. – Troy Taylor, once the starting quarterback at California and now the co-head football coach at Folsom High School, is adamant in a meeting in the locker room Wednesday afternoon that the team will practice the same way it always does, no matter the driving rain that is drenching their royal blue artificial turf.

“Let’s not go out there like kids sliding around in the water,” Taylor says. “Let’s go out there like we’ve got some work to do. And remember, just like any other practice — the ball never touches the ground.”

Though Folsom’s spread offense is 70% passing, the ball rarely touches the ground when the quarterback is Jake Browning, who on Saturday could become the greatest touchdown pass thrower in high school football history.

A senior, Browning already has more records than he can keep track of, and if he throws six more touchdown passes Saturday — a routine game for him — he will have tossed 220 touchdown passes in his three-year varsity career, more than any high school player before him.

Browning, 6-2, 205 pounds, begins this soggy practice throwing one perfect spiral after another while going through Folsom’s various patterns. In the pocket, on the run, outs, posts, deep sideline, he makes all the throws and the tight spirals land softly in the hands of eager receivers despite the miserable conditions.

This is not a big deal to the coaches and players at Folsom, about 25 miles northeast of Sacramento. It’s been raining spirals at Folsom ever since a skinny sophomore Browning started his first varsity game.

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“He goes out first game and everyone’s wondering if this sophomore is going to be up to it,” says Taylor, who played at Cal in the late 1980s and who shares head coaching duties with Kris Richardson, who played offensive tackle at New Mexico. “He throws 10 touchdowns, but you would have never known on the sidelines if he had thrown 10 touchdown passes or 10 interceptions. He wasn’t giddy or overly exuberant. I thought this guy had a chance to be pretty good.”

Pretty good didn’t begin to describe what Browning would do. As a sophomore, he led the Bulldogs to a 14-1 record, throwing for 5,248 yards and a state-record 63 touchdowns. As a junior, he again directed the Bulldogs to a 14-1 record, this time compiling 5,737 passing yards and 75 touchdowns. Last week, when Folsom won a sectional semifinal playoff game to improve to 13-0, Browning threw six touchdown passes, giving him 76 for the season, breaking the state single-season record for the third consecutive season.

He now stands at 214 career TD passes, trailing only national record-holder Maty Mauk, who set the record of 219 in 2011 at Kenton (Ohio) High School and now plays quarterback for Missouri. Folsom, which is ranked 13th nationally by USA TODAY High School Sports, will be favored Saturday night in the sectional championship game against Tracy (Calif.) at Sacramento State. If the Bulldogs win, they could play two more games — a Northern California Division I title game, then a state title game against a Southern California foe.

NEXT STOP UW

Getting six touchdown passes in a game is routine for Browning, who will graduate this month and enroll at Washington, where he will play for Chris Petersen and continue to draw comparisons to Kellen Moore, who quarterbacked Petersen’s Boise State teams to surprising heights from 2008-11. Browning has thrown six or more TD passes in 21 of his 43 career games. He’s done it nine times this year. Once he threw for eight touchdowns in the first half.

How does this happen?

“Really good schemes, good practices, good line play, attention to detail,” says Browning in nearly a whisper.

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Around here, they call Jake’s dad, Ed Browning, a former Oregon State quarterback and now an executive for a financial services firm, “Easy Ed” because of his soft-spoken easygoing manner.

They call Jake “JB,” and he seems to have inherited a fair bit from his dad.

Getting Browning to talk about himself is like asking him to throw an interception. By the way, he’s thrown only four of those this year.

“You know, we coaches are always moving on to the next play, the next game,” Taylor says. “But sometimes we have to stop and think about some of this. I mean, four interceptions? That’s incredible.”

Is Browning thinking about the TD record?

“No, not really,” he says. “I just want to win.”

Is he aware that people are comparing him to past California great high school quarterbacks Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers?

He laughs.

“Not even in the same ballpark,” he says.

For a college prospect, his size is just average, maybe a little below average. His arm strength is just average, maybe a little above average. And his pocket mobility is probably average.

But Taylor says there is something he learned early on that is very special about Browning.

“We were playing a game in his sophomore year, and from the sideline I thought the crossing route was wide open,” Taylor says. “Jake threw it away and the drive ended, and I came over on the sideline and I said, ‘Why didn’t you hit the crossing route?’

“He goes into this long explanation that when he dropped back, the official was in the way. By the time it was clear, the protection was breaking down and he couldn’t get the ball there. I thought, ‘Right. This guys is just blowing smoke.’ Then we watched the film that night, and it was like a photographic memory thing. Everything he said, that’s exactly what we were looking at.

“I told David Cutcliffe (the Duke coach, who mentored Peyton Manning at Tennessee and Eli Manning at Mississippi) that story, and he was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s just like one of my first interactions with Eli.’ There are a lot of good quarterbacks, but I think there are a few who see the field really slowly, at a different speed than anyone else. Like Tom Brady. I think that’s kind of how Jake sees the field.”

O-K-G CLUB

Maybe Rivals.com didn’t consider that as much as more concrete evidence when posting its recruit rankings and listed Browning the 19th-best quarterback in the country.

Browning doesn’t care about the ranking. He’s impressed the man he wanted to impress — Washington’s Petersen — and is looking forward to being in the O-K-G club, Petersen-speak for “our kind of guys.”

What kind of guy is that?

“Competitive,” Browning says. “Good grades. High character. Hard working.”

And good teammate, says Folsom wide receiver Cole Thompson, a senior who has caught 29 touchdown passes from Browning this season.

“He doesn’t have a big head,” Thompson says. “If you looked at all the players together, you wouldn’t be able to pick him.”

For all the crazy numbers and the league and sectional championships, that quality of just being a player among players is what pleases Browning’s father.

“The thing I’m most proud about is that Jake got to know the experience of playing football with his buddies, guys he’s grown up with,” says Ed.

“I think that’s more meaningful than all the touchdowns and all the records and I really mean that. You hope your kid can make it at this and enjoy it for all it is. All the rest of it can end tomorrow.”

If it does, in Browning’s case, it certainly won’t be forgotten.