St. Thomas Aquinas beat the sixth-best team in America on Friday night. Nobody else in the country beat a team ranked that high all weekend. The Fort Lauderdale school moves up one spot, to fourth, and first place was never on the table.
That will annoy some people. Good.
| # | Team | Rec | Last wk | Move |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | St. Frances Academy (MD) | 2-0 | 1 | hold |
| 2 | Santa Margarita (CA) | 3-0 | 2 | hold |
| 3 | IMG Academy (FL) | 3-0 | 4 | up 1 |
| 4 | St. Thomas Aquinas (FL) | 3-0 | 5 | up 1 |
| 5 | Buford (GA) | 2-0 | 7 | up 2 |
| 6 | Baylor School (TN) | 3-0 | 3 | down 3 |
| 7 | Columbus (FL) | 2-1 | 6 | down 1 |
| 8 | Sierra Canyon (CA) | 2-0 | 8 | hold |
| 9 | Allen (TX) | 2-0 | 15 | up 6 |
| 10 | Centennial, Corona (CA) | 1-1 | 11 | up 1 |
Aquinas at fourth
The case against us is a good one, so here it is in full. Aquinas is 3-0, and it beat Columbus of Miami 31-24 on its own field Friday. Columbus is the team that beat Bishop Gorman a week earlier. That is a real month of work.
It is also not a month everybody up here has had, and that cuts in both directions. Santa Margarita beat Centennial of Corona by a point. Columbus got here by playing top-ten opposition itself. Bishop Gorman beat St. John Bosco, and Bosco sits 14th now, which tells you how fast one of these wins ages.
St. Frances Academy and IMG Academy do not own a win like that. Not because they lost one. Because the game has not happened yet.
A power board answers one question. Who wins on a neutral field this Saturday afternoon? IMG Academy of Bradenton, St. Frances Academy of Baltimore and Santa Margarita of Rancho Santa Margarita, California are the three we think beat Aquinas there today.
Fourth behind those three is not an insult in any season, and it is close to a compliment in this one.
The quieter point underneath matters more than the number. Two very good teams played a one-score game in September, and the scoreboard settled which was better on Friday. That is the only real evidence anybody has this early, and it is why Columbus falls one place and not five.
It settled Friday. It did not settle November.
Allen is the one nobody is talking about
Six spots is a quiet-looking move for what Allen went out and did on Friday night in Texas.
Allen beat DeSoto 50-6. A week earlier it beat Duncanville by 19. Those are two of the most decorated programs in the state, back to back, by a combined 63 points. Allen has spent two Fridays making state semifinalists look like they wandered into the wrong stadium.
Above it, not much moved and nothing needed to. St. Frances Academy holds at first on a 38-6 win at Vero Beach, and Santa Margarita holds at second, both doing what a top-two team is supposed to do to an opponent it should handle.
Buford of Georgia moves to fifth on a 41-7 win at Mallard Creek in Charlotte.
Baylor School of Chattanooga slides to sixth, and it has nothing to do with the offense. Baylor can score with anybody in the country. The defense has been the open question all season, and giving up 33 to an opponent that is now 0-3 did nothing to close it.
Those two opened camp against each other in a scrimmage. What we saw with our own eyes is that a real one between them would be a very competitive football game. They are fifth and sixth now, which sounds about right.
Arizona changed hands
Basha of Chandler has been the No. 1 team in Arizona since the preseason, and it is not anymore.
Orange Lutheran of Orange, California beat the Bears 23-17 at Orange Coast College, the second straight week Basha's offense has gone quiet late in a game it looked capable of controlling. Hamilton, across town in the same city, takes the state on the back of a 44-0 shutout of Arbor View of Las Vegas.
The rest of the state had a night as well. Liberty of Peoria beat Corner Canyon of Draper, Utah 38-24. Centennial of Peoria drove into Anaheim and beat Servite 22-14. Chandler hung 42 on Cathedral Catholic of San Diego.
Four Arizona programs beat ranked opposition from three different states in one evening. This is a state that used to spend the whole of September playing itself.
Liberty is the biggest riser on the board, up 25 places to 21st from 46th. Corner Canyon is the other side of that scoreboard, and Utah's best team sits 28th with its first loss.
Folsom and Mission Viejo swapped lives
One game did all of this. Folsom beat Mission Viejo 35-21, climbed 23 places to 27th, and pushed Mission Viejo out of the top fifty on the same play.
De La Salle of Concord went 42-3 over Cardinal Newman of Santa Rosa and moved up twelve to 22nd. Northern California now has two teams inside the top thirty, which it did not have a week ago.
Hough of Cornelius, North Carolina had the quietest big win of the weekend. It beat Providence Day of Charlotte 30-3, held a ranked opponent to a field goal, and moved to 16th. North Crowley of Fort Worth did something similar to Southlake Carroll, 40-10, and jumped fourteen.
Tennessee had a rough Friday
Brentwood Academy of Brentwood, Tennessee opened this season 18th in the country. It is 61st now, and we are not convinced there are sixty teams that would beat it. Here we are anyway.
Brentwood Academy lost 31-23 at home to St. Joseph's Prep of Philadelphia, a team playing its first game of the year. That came a week after a home loss to Baylor. Two defeats in its own building inside two weeks, and a 1-2 record.
Oakland of Murfreesboro, Tennessee had the other one. It lost 22-21 to Smyrna on a two-point conversion with 33 seconds left and dropped 33 places, to 57th. A losing record and an unranked opponent is the most expensive combination on the board, and Friday it cost the 24th-best team in America.
Smyrna is the complication, and it is worth knowing. It is 1-2, and every one of its three games has been decided by a single point. Beaten 21-20 by Brentwood High School, the Academy's crosstown rival, then 29-28 by Hendersonville, then this. That is not a bad football team. It is a team that had not won a close one yet.
DeMatha of Hyattsville, Maryland nearly joined them. It trailed 20-7 in the fourth quarter at Imhotep Charter in Philadelphia and escaped 21-20. It fell nine places anyway. Winning ugly still counts, and it still costs.
One hundred names, starting Monday
The board goes to 100 this week.
Fifty has been too small for a month. Every Monday we leave off programs that would beat somebody already on the board. Every Friday the best games turn out to be between teams ranked 40th and 80th that nobody has put a number on. A country with this much football in it does not fit into fifty lines.
The bottom half is full of teams the fifty could never reach. Creekside of Fairburn, Georgia drove to Montvale, New Jersey and beat St. Joseph Regional by 29. Iona Prep of New Rochelle, New York went to Syracuse and ended a 41-game Christian Brothers Academy winning streak.
Good Counsel of Olney, Maryland beat Bergen Catholic by two. Hewitt-Trussville beat Hoover, which is how Alabama settles arguments. The scoreboard goes to 100 next week as well.
What a hundred names cannot tell you
One more thing before Monday, and we would rather say it ourselves than wait for somebody to say it to us.
Put these hundred teams in a bracket and the favorites would not always win. They might lose more often than they win. Put our top four on a field and play it four times and you could get four different winners, and not one of those games ends in a blowout. Widen it to ten and nobody comes out clean.
Drop any team on this board into a round-robin with the top ten. It loses two. Probably three.
There is no team in America you can put first and say with a straight face that it beats everybody. That team does not exist this year.
None of which is an argument against ranking them. High school football has no central playoff, so a number beside a name is the only place the argument gets to happen at all.
There is a reason no playoff exists, and it is not appetite. Look at where last season ended.
IMG finished on November 7. Utah crowned Corner Canyon on November 20, the Thursday before Thanksgiving. Florida gave St. Thomas Aquinas a title on December 11, California gave Santa Margarita the Open Division on December 13, and Georgia crowned Buford on December 16. Texas did not finish until December 20, North Shore over Duncanville at AT&T Stadium.
Every one of those champions is on this board today. Six weeks separate the first of those finishes from the last, and a bracket that waits on all of them kicks off in January.
St. Frances played Corner Canyon on December 10 last year and won by 17. Corner Canyon had not played in twenty days. Three weeks is long enough to become a different football team, and that is before anybody asks a program to skip its own state playoff to show up.
The hard part is not appetite and it is not money. It is the calendar.
Overtime is reported to be building a four-team national bracket for this season, and somebody should. They are trying something nobody else has, and we hope it works. Until it does, this is what we have, and we would rather run it in public with our name on it.
Fourth is not a knock on St. Thomas Aquinas. It is a starting position, and the Raiders have two months to make us look stupid about it. Bookmark that.
