Basha Lost by 33 to a Team That Is Not Ranked Anywhere

Our own board took a beating this week. By the time the sweep closed, twelve teams on the SPIN Power 100 had been beaten, and most of those defeats are the ordinary kind: a point here, three points there, a ranked team losing to another ranked team or to a league power that was always going to be a problem.

Centennial of Corona lost to Mater Dei by one. Trinity lost to Baylor by eight. Southlake Carroll lost to Allen by 21. McCallie lost to Ensworth by three. DeMatha lost to Roman Catholic by seven. Those cost a place or two and settle nothing.

Then there is Basha.

The only real fall on the board

Basha is 39th on our board and it lost 40-7 at Pinnacle.

Pinnacle is tenth in Arizona and is not on the national board at all. Nothing else on our Power 100 lost by anything like 33 points to a team we do not rank.

It is the second time in eight days that Basha has been the story for the wrong reason. It came into September as the No. 1 team in Arizona, lost 23-17 to Orange Lutheran, and dropped to third. Now this.

The result does not say much about Orange Lutheran, which is the reflex reading and it does not hold. A team that loses by six on the road and then by 33 at home has told you about itself, not about the team that beat it first.

Three games between ranked teams, and the closest was ten to nine

Mater Dei trailed the tenth-ranked team in the country 9-0, did not score a touchdown until the fourth quarter, and won 10-9 when Centennial missed a 27-yard field goal with 2:30 left. The Monarchs are 4-0. They have Bishop Gorman next and Santa Margarita after that.

Baylor went into a sold-out building in Louisville and beat a program with three consecutive Kentucky state titles, 35-27. David Gabriel Georges carried 26 times for 315 yards and scored five touchdowns, the figure Baylor School's own recap prints. The Chattanooga school has now won sixteen in a row.

Allen won 56-35, with the Dallas Morning News putting the Eagles above 700 yards of total offense. The play that set the margin was a 40-yard throw from Ty Snell to Zach Williams with two seconds left in the first half. Allen is 3-0, and the three teams it has beaten are Duncanville, DeSoto and Southlake Carroll.

Underneath them, the West did the scoring

St. John Bosco beat Kahuku 49-13. Bishop Amat won by 52, Mission Viejo by 56, Sierra Canyon by 52 on Thursday.

Corner Canyon put 52 on Eastwood of El Paso and gave up seven. Liberty of Peoria beat Highland 41-7. De La Salle beat Saint Francis of Mountain View 54-10. Central East of Fresno won 56-7.

The board's top five did not play each other and mostly did not play opposition that could hurt them. That is September. It changes in three weeks.

The rest of the board's bad week

Seven of those twelve rest on a single publisher, which is enough to establish who lost and not enough to print the score with confidence. They are here because the shape of the week matters more than any one line in it, and the shape is that the bottom half of our board had a worse week than the top.

Six of the teams that did the beating are not on any board of ours. Hawthorne, Roman Catholic, Ensworth, Archbishop Spalding, Rock Hill and Highlands all have a case to make on Monday.

The other one that got away from its board

Archbishop Riordan, seventh in Northern California, was shut out 31-0 by an unranked Cardinal Newman of Santa Rosa. On our regional boards, which we do track to the last row, that and Basha are the two results where a ranked team lost to an unranked one.

Both of them lost badly. Neither lost to a team that will be on this board on Monday either.

That is the sentence to hold onto before the word parity gets used about September.