Count the preseason No. 1 teams in American high school football this summer. You get five. Not five polls picking from a consensus. Five different schools, each one somebody's best team in the country.
MaxPreps opened with St. John Bosco. High School Football America opened with St. John Bosco. USA Today's Super 25 opened with IMG Academy, and so did High School On SI. ESPN's preseason top 25 went with Buford, per the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Rivals, back in June, called DeSoto the best team in the land.
And this desk has St. Frances Academy.
Nobody has played a down. Everybody is certain. Welcome back.
THE SPIN 2026 PRESEASON TOP 50
- St. Frances Academy (MD)
- St. John Bosco (CA)
- Bishop Gorman (NV)
- Baylor School (TN)
- IMG Academy (FL)
- Buford (GA)
- Santa Margarita (CA)
- Centennial, Corona (CA)
- Mater Dei (CA)
- Duncanville (TX)
- Grayson (GA)
- Brentwood Academy (TN)
- St. Thomas Aquinas (FL)
- Corner Canyon (UT)
- Carrollton (GA)
- DeSoto (TX)
- Sierra Canyon (CA)
- Miami Carol City (FL)
- Basha (AZ)
- Thompson (AL)
- Lone Peak (UT)
- North Shore (TX)
- American Heritage (FL)
- Creekside (GA)
- Brownsburg (IN)
- Allen (TX)
- Hamilton (AZ)
- Don Bosco Prep (NJ)
- Bryant (AR)
- Southlake Carroll (TX)
- DeMatha (MD)
- Chaminade-Madonna (FL)
- Hough (NC)
- Mount Carmel (IL)
- St. Joseph Regional (NJ)
- Oakland (TN)
- South Oak Cliff (TX)
- Miami Central (FL)
- De La Salle (CA)
- Chandler (AZ)
- Mission Viejo (CA)
- Edna Karr (LA)
- Thomas County Central (GA)
- St. Joseph's Prep (PA)
- Bixby (OK)
- Folsom (CA)
- Waxahachie (TX)
- La Salle College (PA)
- Roman Catholic (PA)
- Gainesville (GA)
The math picked Bosco
Run every poll through our composite formula and Bosco wins going away. The Braves score 98.4, and the gap back to Bishop Gorman at 95.9 is the widest anybody has opened at the top of our board in two preseasons. IMG sits 95.0. St. Frances is fourth at 93.3.
That is not a squeaker. That is Bellflower's summer.
So why is our internal board, the heaviest-weighted input in the whole machine, still pointing at a Catholic school on East Chase Street in Baltimore?
The night that explains everything
St. Frances lost one game in 2025. One. The Panthers went 9-1 through the regular slate, closed 10-1, and capped the year by beating Corner Canyon, owners of the premier offense in the country, 37-20 in the first-ever Overtime Nationals championship in December.
That night is the whole argument, so lean in.
All season, the rule in a St. Frances game was simple: the best defensive stat line on the field belonged to a St. Frances player. Every opponent, every week. Then came the national final, and for the only time all year, it didn't. Corner Canyon corner Joaquin Rodriguez, a SPIN All-American, filled the sheet with an interception, a sack, a tackle for loss, two passes defended and four stops. And because the record book was blank when everybody walked in, the first sack and the first interception in Overtime Nationals history belong, forever, to a player on the losing team.
St. Frances won by 17 anyway.
Don't read that as the famous defense getting handled, either, because it didn't. The Panthers held the country's premier offense scoreless for two and a half quarters. Corner Canyon moved it between the twenties and kept dying in the red zone, left seven points on the field on two missed field goals and a missed extra point, and finally got on the board on a fumbled snap in the end zone, not a drive. A defense that let opponents reach 20 only three times all season, this game included, worked its normal shift.
What turned it into a rout was everything else. Jesse Legree scored three touchdowns, one of them on a kickoff return, the best offensive player on a field crowded with every one of Corner Canyon's stars. He's at Oregon State now, and we hear he might be a day one starter, which would surprise absolutely no one who watched this game. And Jireh Edwards, the five-star who wore No. 0 that night and wears Alabama crimson now, pinned the event's first-ever safety on that same premier offense.
So four firsts went into the Overtime Nationals book on opening night: Rodriguez took the sack and the pick, Legree took the kickoff return, Edwards took the safety. The team that took three phases and the trophy plays its home games on East Chase Street. That's not a unit. That's a program.
And measure the stage before moving on, because the sport may never have built a bigger one. Billed as the first true national championship game high school football has staged. Prime time on ESPN2, Joe Tessitore and Dan Orlovsky in the booth. The first ESPN-televised high school game Maryland had ever hosted, in a stadium that sold out within a week, with a quarter of a million dollars riding on the result. It was Eric Kjar's last ride, too, the Corner Canyon legend's final game before Weber State came calling. That is the night Messay Hailemariam's program treated like a home date. Because it was one.
And credit the people who built the stage, while we're here. A true national championship game is an idea this sport kicked around for decades without anybody staging one. Overtime did it, and did it the hard way. The original vision, SPIN can report, was a four-team bracket, and the field kept collapsing underneath the organizers right up to kickoff, including IMG's last-minute withdrawal from its date with St. Frances, a pullout Messay Hailemariam called devastating, per the Baltimore Banner. Hunter Mandel's operation kept the game alive anyway and ran the night like the event had existed for fifty years. That is what trendsetting looks like, and it is exactly what this sport has been asking for. The encore: that four-team bracket may finally happen this December, per the Review-Journal's reporting out of Las Vegas, with Bishop Gorman expected in the mix. We will have a lot more to say about that.
The head-to-head aged badly
Now the counterargument, because we do not dodge those: Bosco won the meeting. 21-14, Sept. 5, in Bellflower, the Panthers' only loss of the season. Fair.
Look closely at what that win was, though. A week-3 game. Seven points. Bosco's grass, with St. Frances on the back end of a cross-country trip. And the rally ran through one man: down 14-7 in the fourth, Madden Williams tied it on a 51-yard one-handed catch, then set up the winner with a 36-yarder, and finished with seven catches for 180 yards. He's at Texas A&M now.
Graduation cuts both ways, we know. St. Frances graduated plenty too, Legree included. And Bellflower is hardly bare: Koa Malau'ulu, the sophomore who threw for 2,361 yards and 33 touchdowns against five picks, is back behind center, per SI's schedule coverage, and he's most of why Bosco sits second on this board. But Baltimore returns an anchor of its own. Raylaun Henry, a top-30 national recruit in the 2027 class and a Texas A&M commit since November, walks back into that secondary. Rosters argue to a draw. So decide it on where the two teams went after that night, because they went opposite directions.
St. Frances never lost again and won the national final. Bosco never played for a title at all. The Braves closed on back-to-back losses, and the one that ended the season came at home, as the No. 1 seed, 20-19 to an Orange Lutheran team that arrived officially 2-8. Two of those eight losses were paper forfeits, we'll grant it. It was still a team Bosco had beaten 48-0 one month earlier. Our final 2025 board: St. Frances 1st. Bosco 14th.
September says Bosco. December says St. Frances. We rank teams partly for how seasons end.
Neutral field, tonight, new season, new rosters, no travel, no excuses, we take Baltimore. That is the whole case and we are comfortable in it.
Both claimants hit the road early, which is the beautiful part. Bosco opens Aug. 21 at Bishop Gorman's Fertitta Field, a game the Review-Journal notes Gorman has won both previous times these two met, though the last one was 2016. MaxPreps has it streaming on its YouTube channel. Gorman will counter with Hayden Stepp, the five-star Oregon commit ESPN rates as Nevada's No. 1 recruit, back for his senior year. Two top-three teams, opening night, no warmup games for either.
Then Sept. 11, our No. 1 leaves home too. St. Frances plays Bryant at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock, the inaugural Patriot Bowl, moved off Bryant's campus because, per On3's report, the Hornets' own stadium couldn't hold the expected crowd.
And understand who's hosting. Bryant has won seven of the last eight Arkansas 7A championships, just finished its second straight perfect season at 13-0, and hasn't lost a football game since 2023. The Hornets closed last December ranked 41st on our final board, the Massey computers have them 38th in the country right now, and they open this one 29th on ours. This is not a courtesy stop. Bryant coach Quad Sanders put it plainly in On3's report: "You got to find games, but you don't want any game... You want a challenge."
A 54,000-seat college stadium for a high school game in September, against a program that treats losing as a once-a-decade event. That's the tax bracket our No. 1 lives in.
Santa Margarita got mugged
The single strangest line in this year's poll sweep belongs to the Eagles.
MaxPreps has Santa Margarita sixth. HSFA has them seventh. High School On SI has them eighth. USA Today left them out of the Super 25 entirely, and because the Super 25 carries a full point of weight in our formula, that one snub cost Santa Margarita 18 composite points and dropped them from fifth to 14th.
Our internal board still has them seventh, which tells you exactly how much of that fall we blame on a ballot.
The mirror image is Waxahachie. USA Today ranks the Indians 10th in America. MaxPreps ranks them 50th. That is a 40-slot disagreement between two serious outlets about one Texas football team, and it is the widest single gap in the entire sweep. We have them 46th and we are bracing to be wrong in one direction or the other.
Check the headsets
One more column in the ledger before Utah: who's actually coaching these teams.
Our No. 1 employs the sport's best story. Messay Hailemariam, an Ethiopian-born former Maryland walk-on, took St. Frances to the first national championship in Maryland history, and every senior off that roster left on a full scholarship: Zion Elee to Maryland, Kmari Bing to Ohio State, and Jireh Edwards, the safety Joe Tessitore called "the next Ed Reed" before the final, to Alabama.
Here is the article of faith at this desk: defense wins championships. St. Frances walked into December as the No. 1 defense in the country by the Massey ratings, having allowed 67 points in nine games, and walked out with the trophy that proves the sentence. The names graduate. The identity doesn't. Defense is in that program's DNA the way sports is in ours, and with Raylaun Henry patrolling the same secondary, we expect the 2026 Panthers to look a lot like the 2025 Panthers with new numbers on the jerseys. That is what the top of this board is built on.
Santa Margarita's No. 7 comes with its own headset argument, and understating it should be illegal: what Carson Palmer did was unprecedented. The Southern Section is the toughest region in all of high school football, and Palmer won it going away, in his first season as a head coach anywhere. His Eagles beat Matt Logan's Centennial in the season's first month, watched the Huskies knock off Mater Dei twice and climb to No. 1 in California, then met them again at the Rose Bowl for the Southern Section title and won 42-7. Two weeks later they embarrassed NorCal's best, De La Salle, 47-13 for the Open crown. That is not a promising debut. That is a program announcing it plays in a different league. USA Today still left his team out entirely.
Bosco's counterweight is real too. Jason Negro is the most battle-tested coach on this list, a tenure old enough that his program has been the standard for over a decade, with the 2022 MaxPreps national title in the case. Elite coach, elite roster, and still a November like the last one. That's the sport.
And Mater Dei at 9 reads different once you know the bench. Raul Lara went 13-0 and won a national championship in his first year in Santa Ana, then watched the crown slip in year two while Santa Margarita rose. He owns six CIF Southern Section titles across Long Beach Poly and Mater Dei, and he has never lost to Bosco since arriving. A champion retooling is not a program declining. Nine might be the floor.
The Utah call stands
Here is the part Arizona will email us about.
The national polls have Corner Canyon 48th and 50th where they rank the Chargers at all, and USA Today does not rank them at all. We have Corner Canyon 14th. The polls have Lone Peak nowhere, including 116th in HSFA's 300. We have Lone Peak 21st.
Before anybody laughs at the 21, do the homework. The Knights beat Corner Canyon in the regular season in each of the last two years, 28-21 and then 42-21 with five takeaways, and led the champs at halftime of both title games. That is not a team on our board for feels. USA Today's No. 1 team, IMG, opens at their place Aug. 21 anyway.
And the 14 isn't nostalgia either. Corner Canyon brings back three starters on offense and five on defense from the three-peat team, per the Deseret News, with safety Diesel Dart, a Utah commit, headlining a returning group our preseason watch list flags twice more in Tate Patterson and Josh Harris. Teams don't get grandfathered onto this board. They get counted.
Now follow the chain from last September. Corner Canyon ran Liberty of Peoria out of Draper 45-14 on Sept. 5, and Liberty was, we would argue, the second-best team in Arizona. That same Liberty then took Basha to the wire in the Open Division semifinal, losing 19-16 in a game they controlled for most of the night. Basha is USA Today's No. 8 team in America. We have the Bears 19th.
Zero Utah teams made the Super 25. Three Arizona teams did. We think that is backwards, we think it is about how the two states are built up front, and we have said so in writing now so nobody can claim we backfilled it in October.
Arizona can take those spots back on a field. Sept. 4 in Peoria is available.
Tennessee is loaded and nobody is saying it
We have Baylor School fourth and Brentwood Academy 12th, and the rest of the country has not caught up. Baylor is 13th to USA Today, 18th to ESPN, ninth to SI. Brentwood misses HSFA's top 60 entirely.
And that count skips McCallie, the Chattanooga program that earned its own national attention by physically dominating California power Mission Viejo, 25-14, last fall. The way Tennessee's best are built up front, somebody from that state could make a run at No. 1 before this is over.
Baylor and Brentwood met in December's Division II-AAA title game. Baylor won it, finished 12-0, and returns David Gabriel Georges, the SPIN All-American and reigning MaxPreps national player of the year and a Tennessee commit since July 22. They run it back Aug. 20 in Chattanooga on ESPN2, first game of ESPN's opening slate.
If you want to know whether we are early or just wrong, that broadcast is the answer key.
Elsewhere: DeSoto is Rivals' No. 1 team in America and MaxPreps' No. 33, and we split it at 16 until somebody's film settles the argument. St. Thomas Aquinas is MaxPreps' No. 3 and our No. 13, because the rings are real and the September schedule is realer.
Five No. 1s, one ball, and the first kickoff is 13 days out.
Somebody in this business is about to look ridiculous. Statistically, it might be us.
