Two spots separate these teams on the SPIN Power 100. Nothing else on our board this week is that close.
Bishop Gorman of Las Vegas, our 12th, goes to Mater Dei of Santa Ana, our 10th, on Friday at 7:00 PM Pacific. The game is at Santa Ana Stadium, also called Eddie West Field, at 602 North Flower Street. That is Mater Dei's home site this season and it is not the campus. It is the MaxPreps Game of the Week and it streams on NFHS Network, with no linear television partner.
Mater Dei got here by a point
Mater Dei is 4-0, and it reached 10th on our board by beating Centennial of Corona 10-9 in Santa Ana. That was the whole margin.
Centennial is 1-2 and both of its losses are by a single point, 21-20 to Santa Margarita and 10-9 here. Nobody has beaten that team by more than a point all season, which tells you something about the two wins and something about the record.
Gorman is 3-1. It is first on our Nevada board and it did not play last week.
The series is the story
These programs have met six times since 2017 and Gorman is still looking for its first win in the series, per MaxPreps. Two of the last three were settled on the final play, and Mater Dei took last season's meeting 27-24.
That is the frame for Friday night. Gorman arrives with the longer list of near misses and the shorter list of reasons to be impressed.
What Friday does to the board
Our top six did not move a place last week, and we said plainly that we could not separate any of them on a neutral field. The movement in this board lives from seventh down, and both of these teams are sitting in it.
A Gorman win puts a 4-1 team with a road result over a top ten opponent above Mater Dei and hands Nevada its best win of the season. A Mater Dei win makes it 5-0 with two one score wins over ranked teams inside three weeks, and the case for moving it up stops needing to be argued.
Kickoff is 7:00 PM in California and Nevada, 8:00 PM in Utah and Arizona.
