Lone Peak signed up for an opening stretch almost nobody in America would volunteer for: two of the top five teams on our national board, one suburban stadium, fourteen days. Friday night the first of them arrived and won 59-3.
IMG Academy, the Bradenton, Florida academy we rank fifth in the country, was up 21-0 before the home crowd had settled and never let the night breathe. It was 38-0 at the half and the running clock followed. Keith Smith returned a punt 95 yards for one of the touchdowns. Lone Peak turned it over four times. It was IMG's first game of the season. It didn't look like anyone's first game of anything.
Lone Peak's number takes the hit
The Knights came in 1-0 and feeling good about it. A week ago they went south and beat Crimson Cliffs 33-21 behind senior quarterback Cruz Christensen, and our Week 2 Utah board kept them second in the state behind Corner Canyon.
Friday doesn't erase that. It reprices it.
Now the honest part. This isn't the Lone Peak of the last two seasons, and Friday made that impossible to miss. The Pula twins are at BYU now, and the Knights miss them in both directions: Jaron and Kennan took the top off defenses as recently as last fall, and Kennan's old spot at safety felt every bit as empty Friday. Bott Mulitalo, the four-star anchor who worked both lines, is gone in the same class, along with a handful of other starters from a year ago. The speed outside and the size up front left in one graduating class, and nowhere did the absence show more than in the trenches, where the game is actually decided. From our seats, IMG felt like it was on offense even when it was defending.
A 56-point home loss is a data point with no soft reading, and here is ours: right now, Lone Peak is not the second-best team in Utah. It doesn't stop at the state line, either. We've carried the Knights on our national Top 50, and Friday said they aren't one of the fifty best teams in the country right now, and probably not one of the hundred best. That's our miss, not their failure, and we can live with saying so in print. We ranked what this program has been; Friday showed us what it is in August of a rebuilding year. The next boards we publish will fix it out loud, starting with Utah's on Monday.
The rest of the state's Friday made the contrast sting. Mountain Ridge shut out Lehi 42-0. West blanked East 60-0. Davis hung 56 on Fremont. Corner Canyon won by 33 in Provo. Three of our Utah board teams lost Friday, and every one of them lost to a team sitting higher on our own sheets: Timpview to Corner Canyon, American Fork with a 31-11 road loss at Mater Dei, our national No. 9, and Lone Peak to the visitor this story is about.
IMG Academy came with a memory
There was an edge under IMG's efficiency Friday, and it has a date on it. The Ascenders' last trip to Utah ended in a one-point loss, 35-34 at Corner Canyon in August 2024. IMG's general manager brought that night up unprompted on Friday, telling SPIN that changes were made after that trip. Read that back once more: the machine that just won 59-3, off an unbeaten 9-0 season, rebuilt itself partly in answer to a Utah team. Corner Canyon still holds the lease on a corner of IMG's memory.
Spend a Friday around this program and the other thing that stands out isn't football at all. IMG carries itself like a professional organization because, in every way that matters, it is one. Talk with its athletic director and its general manager, as we did, and the same theme keeps coming up: the ambition runs well past the football field. They want the championships and the big games, sure. They just won't chase them at the expense of what sits at the core of the operation, what's good for the athlete, during high school and long after it. There's a bigger story there, and we'll tell it another week. Friday it mostly explained the roster.
Bishop Gorman is already booked
Here's the part that tells you what Lone Peak thinks of itself: the heavyweight half of the schedule still hasn't arrived, and nobody in Highland is asking for a refund. Bishop Gorman, our national No. 3, comes to Highland on Sept. 4.
The Gaels haven't exactly been cooling off, either. Gorman opened its season with a 41-0 half against Somerset Academy Losee before lightning ended the night, per the Review-Journal, and on Friday it beat St. John Bosco, our national No. 2, 38-28 at home in the game the whole country watched. The team getting off the plane in Utah next month will not be a rebuilding project.
Most programs coming off a 59-3 night would want a get-right game next. Lone Peak gets a week at Skyline, and then our national No. 3 walks into its stadium. That was the plan when the plan looked brave, and it's still the plan now that it looks expensive.
None of this is an obituary. A program in transition that schedules IMG and Gorman back to back is playing a long game on purpose, and the fastest way to find out what you have is to play somebody who has everything. The season Lone Peak chose was designed to find out exactly how good it is. Friday it found out where the floor is.
Fourteen days, two answers. The first one came in loud. The second one lands Sept. 4.
