Six teams came off the SPIN Power 100 this week. Five of the six that replaced them are teams that beat a ranked team on Friday or Saturday, and the sixth won by 33.
That is the shape of Week 5. Seventeen of the hundred lost, and only four of those seventeen lost to another team on this board. The rest were beaten by programs we had not ranked at all, and this week several of them are ranked.
The top six is unchanged, and the team with the best win of the week is part of why
Not one place moved in the first six. St. Frances Academy, Santa Margarita, IMG Academy, St. Thomas Aquinas, Buford, Baylor School, in that order, exactly as they stood a week ago.
Baylor had the best win anybody had this week. It went to Louisville and beat Trinity 35-27, a team that has since moved up to 24th on this board, and it is 4-0. That is a road result against a quality opponent and it is the kind of night that tells you what a team is.
Baylor did not move. Neither did anybody else in front of it.
Here is the honest position, because it is more useful than pretending to a precision we do not have. The top six are interchangeable. We would be about as comfortable with Baylor first as with Baylor sixth, and about as comfortable with St. Frances third as with St. Frances first. On a neutral field we could not confidently pick a winner among any of them, and we have not seen anything this season that says St. Frances is not the best team in the country. They are the defending national champions and they get the benefit of that doubt until somebody takes it from them.
Four of the six won and won comfortably. St. Frances beat Bryant of Arkansas 40-7 at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock, a neutral field rather than a road trip, which matters for how a win is weighted even though it does not change who won. Santa Margarita beat Inderkum 41-0. St. Thomas Aquinas beat Dillard 49-0. Buford beat Miami Central 18-7. IMG Academy did not play.
The top of a board should move when somebody is beaten, not when everybody wins. Nobody in the top six was beaten. They keep collecting big wins and they keep giving us no reason to move each other around.
Trinity goes up after losing, which is the same principle running the other way
Trinity of Louisville lost and rose seven places, from 31st to 24th.
That is not a mistake. It lost 35-27 at home to a 4-0 Baylor team we rate as highly as anybody in the country, and it was a one score game deep into it. A close loss to an elite opponent tells you a team is good, not that it is bad. It is the same judgment we made about Columbus earlier this season, when it lost at St. Thomas Aquinas by a touchdown in a game it was in position to win, and we barely moved it.
Miami Central is the other side of the same call. It lost 18-7 at Buford and fell five places, from 24th to 29th, which is about as gently as a defeat gets treated on this board.
Mater Dei and Centennial swapped on one point
Mater Dei beat Centennial of Corona 10-9 in Santa Ana. Mater Dei goes to tenth. Centennial falls to twentieth, further than the head to head alone would carry it, on an eye-test read that this is a good team playing without much discipline. When two ranked teams play each other, the winner finishes above the loser.
Centennial at 1-2 is not a team in trouble, and the record is misleading in a specific way. Both of its defeats are by a single point, 21-20 to Santa Margarita and 10-9 to Mater Dei. Nobody has beaten Centennial by more than a point this season.
The two hardest falls
St. Joseph's Prep drops 33 places, from 30th to 63rd. It lost 33-3 at Bergen Catholic. A thirty point loss is the harshest category on our ladder and this is the largest fall on the board. It is not larger still because Bergen Catholic is a genuine power rather than an anonymous opponent, which is also why Bergen Catholic is now ranked.
Miami Northwestern drops 28, from 32nd to 60th. It lost 16-12 to Hawthorne. The margin was four points, which is why this is a fall rather than a removal, but Hawthorne won the Florida Rural class state title last season, and a team ranked in our top 35 does not lose that game.
DeMatha falls 15 to 53rd after losing 14-7 to Roman Catholic of Philadelphia. Southlake Carroll falls six after losing at home to Allen. Guyer falls eight, Malvern Prep seven, McCallie five.
Six off
| Was | Team | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 39 | Basha | Lost 40-7 at Pinnacle, an unranked opponent, and has now lost two straight |
| 48 | Good Counsel | Lost 45-20 at home to Archbishop Spalding |
| 56 | Battle Ground Academy | Lost 42-21 to Milton of Georgia |
| 89 | South Pointe | Lost 26-3 to Rock Hill |
| 91 | Boyle County | Lost 41-21 to Highlands |
| 100 | Cardinal Newman (West Palm Beach) | Lost 24-7 to West Boca Raton, our 32nd, from the last place on the board |
Basha is the one that will get argued about. It won the Open Division in Arizona last season and it has now scored 37, 17 and 7 in three weeks against progressively better defenses. It stays on our Arizona Top 10 at seventh, because Arizona is a smaller field and its win over Chandler still counts there. It is off the national board because a 33 point loss to an unranked team is what our ladder says it is.
Six on
Pinnacle enters at 74th. It beat Basha 40-7 in Phoenix and it did it on defense and special teams rather than by outscoring anybody. It is 2-1, and the loss is to Mountain View of Mesa, which is why it enters in the seventies rather than anywhere near where Basha sat.
The other five enter at the bottom, and every one of them is there on a single result against a team that was ranked above them last week.
| # | Team | The result |
|---|---|---|
| 96 | Bergen Catholic | Beat St. Joseph's Prep 33-3 |
| 97 | DeSoto | Beat Duncanville 21-20 |
| 98 | Archbishop Spalding | Beat Good Counsel 45-20 |
| 99 | Roman Catholic | Beat DeMatha 14-7 |
| 100 | Imhotep Charter | Beat Malvern Prep 27-21 |
Those five are placed conservatively on purpose. One result gets a team onto a hundred team board. It does not tell us where on it they belong, and we would rather move them up next week having checked their seasons than seat them high this week having not.
DeSoto is the one that will look strangest and it is the one we are most comfortable with. It is 1-2. Its only win is that single point over Duncanville, and its two defeats are 38-14 at St. Thomas Aquinas and 50-6 at Allen, our fourth and ninth. Beaten by 24 and by 44, and not competitive in either. A team gets onto this board for beating a ranked team. It does not get carried up it for losing badly twice, and 97th is where that adds up.
The risers nobody will notice
Iona Prep moves up fourteen to 49th after a 63-20 win. Mission Viejo moves eleven. Centennial of Peoria and Mountain Ridge move nine each. Mount Carmel eight. Creekside, East St. Louis, Venice and Chandler seven apiece.
Most of that is arithmetic rather than achievement. Six teams left the board from the middle and upper middle of it, so everything below them rose. It is worth saying plainly rather than dressing a vacancy up as a surge.
What we are still working on
Four teams on this board were idle on a schedule gap alone, which is not the same as a confirmed bye, and they are marked as unplayed rather than credited with one.
The exact scores in two games remain in dispute between sources and are not printed here as settled numbers.
The St. James Performance Academy holds at 51st. We established this week that it is one school fielding two football teams and that the game reported against its name on Friday was played by the second squad, not the ranked one. Whether a multi squad performance academy belongs on a scholastic national board is a separate question and it is open.
Rankings are compiled by the SPIN desk from verified results. Where a result rests on a single source, it is used to order the board but not to print a score.
