DeSoto had not played a game yet this season. It got on a plane, flew from Texas to Broward County, and ran into a team that had already had a week to warm up. St. Thomas Aquinas won 38-14.
This was our No. 12 against our No. 16, one of the better matchups anyone put on a schedule this August, and it stopped being a matchup somewhere in the first half. Aquinas scored heavily early and DeSoto spent the rest of the afternoon trying to make the scoreboard lie.
Aquinas is 2-0. It opened the season by beating Western 42-0 on August 21 and has now scored 80 points in two games while giving up 14, all of them on Saturday. DeSoto is 0-1 and has to fly home and start over, which is the risk every program takes when it schedules a national opener on someone else's field.
It is worth being precise about what DeSoto is, because 0-1 will follow it around for a week. This is a Texas program that gets ranked in the national top 20 before it has played a snap, and it agreed to open in Florida against a team that does this every year. Losing that game by 24 is a real result. Refusing to schedule it would have been a different kind of statement.
Saturday was a strange day for the state of Florida hosting people. A few hours away, Bishop Gorman came in as our No. 2 team in the country and lost to Columbus, a team not ranked in our fifty. Two national visitors, two losses, one afternoon. The difference is that Columbus was the surprise and Aquinas was not.
Aquinas has not lost yet and has not been tested in a way that tells us much. Beating a top 20 team by 24 is the sort of thing that moves a board, and it will. What it does not do is answer the only question that matters for a program at this level, which is what happens in November.
