Nevada Power 10: The 2026 Preseason Board

Tonight: Arbor View at West (Salt Lake City), 7 p.m. · Liberty at Mililani (Hawaii) · Losee at Bishop Gorman · Mater East at Faith Lutheran · Coronado at Centennial · Green Valley at Foothill · Palo Verde at Desert Pines. Twenty-one games involving Southern Nevada teams open the season.

Read the right-hand column again

There will be no Clark County School District football team winning an official Nevada state title this fall.

Thirty CCSD programs moved out of 5A and 4A into independent status, beginning now and continuing two more seasons. They are not eligible for the playoffs or a sanctioned championship. They play up to ten games, finish Oct. 23, and use Oct. 16 and Oct. 23 as crossover games that function as a version of a playoff, ending in an inaugural Superintendents Cup. None of them will play Bishop Gorman or any of the six other private and charter schools still eligible for a title.

Liberty's Rich Muraco, who has won 164 games in sixteen seasons, thinks the top independent division will be the most competitive league in the state, and says his players finally feel like they have something they can win.

The arithmetic is still brutal. Southern Nevada's largest classification is down to three eligible teams, and Gorman has won 16 of the past 17 titles in the top class.

1. Bishop Gorman

Twelve wins, another title, and a schedule that stopped pretending Nevada was the point. No. 2 nationally at MaxPreps and High School Football America, No. 3 in USA Today, No. 3 on our board.

After tonight's opener against Losee, the Gaels host St. John Bosco on Aug. 21, then travel to Columbus in Florida, Lone Peak, and Mater Dei. Hayden Stepp is a five-star Oregon commit and the state's top-rated player, with Cal commit Kamil Loud beside him.

Brent Browner's team has said out loud its goal is a national championship. A 17th state title in eighteen years is the thing it has to get out of the way first.

2. Liberty (Henderson)

Nine wins, an Open semifinal loss to Arbor View, and thirty-one varsity players back, including eight defensive starters.

Muraco says the defense is the strength, and it is deep: Malua Atualevao, Champion Ualesi, Carter Christensen, Maximus Paogofie, Rysen Dacosin Arcala, Johnathan Ioane, Pierce Lepisi and edge Aiden Webster. BYU commit Ezra Sanelivi runs it, with dual-threat Selby Griego at quarterback.

The Patriots graduated most of their receivers and open tonight in Hawaii against Mililani anyway.

3. Arbor View

The best public program in Southern Nevada, and the favorite to win the first Superintendents Cup.

Sam Norris went 9-3 in his first season and lost the Open final to Gorman, the second straight year Arbor View has lost that game. Oregon State commit Thaddeus Thatcher threw for 2,625 yards and 29 touchdowns. He has Texas A&M commit Damani Warren, UNLV commit Kai Cypher, UCLA commit Zac Fares and Sacramento State commit Kamareion Bell around him.

The line play is the question. It always is.

Arbor View opens tonight in Salt Lake City against West, our Utah No. 8.

4. Spanish Springs

The most consequential team in Nevada, and almost nobody south of Tonopah has noticed.

Spanish Springs went 13-0 and won the first state championship in program history, beating Faith Lutheran 42-23 at Allegiant Stadium after leading 28-3 at the half, having beaten Bishop Manogue 48-7 in the regional final. It was the first perfect season by a large-class Northern Nevada school since 2008.

With thirty southern programs out of the bracket, the road from Reno just got dramatically shorter.

5. Bishop Manogue

A program that measures itself in championships and just had a down year by its own standards, without quarterback Brandon Mann and lineman Kole Cronin, now at Boise State. Fifth is a bet on program floor, and the new math gives that bet a real payoff.

6. Faith Lutheran

Now one of three eligible teams in the largest classification in Southern Nevada.

Jay Staggs took the Crusaders to a third straight 5A final, beating Las Vegas 17-7 in the region semifinal and rallying from 28 points down against Centennial in the region title game before losing to Spanish Springs. A fourth straight final appearance is close to structural.

7. Reed

Northern Nevada's third team, and a beneficiary of the same clearing that helps Spanish Springs and Manogue.

8. Desert Pines

Our shakiest placement, and we will say so. The Jaguars went 4-6, lost a region quarterfinal to Green Valley, and return only nine players after a wave of transfers. Rob Robles is the fourth head coach in four seasons. Quarterback Jerome Sequeira is back after 1,483 passing yards and 17 touchdowns, with Ja'Mire Ross and his 77 tackles on defense.

9. Foothill

Ranked ninth, and probably our biggest miss on this board.

Vernon Brown's Falcons went 7-4 and reached the Open Division state semifinals, losing to Gorman as one of only two local teams to score on the Gaels all season. Twenty-four players return, including quarterback Ryder Dobbs and his 24 touchdown passes, running back Anthony Taylor and receivers Nixon Gasperosky and Bryce Rodriguez.

A top-four team in the state does not belong ninth. We will fix this once there is a result to justify it.

10. Coronado

Shawn Dupris brings back 35 varsity players, the most returning experience of anyone down here, from a team that went 3-7 and missed the playoffs. Matthias Rantissi, Zeke Rivera, Rocco Casella, Kingston Buffington and Layton Bachhuber lead the group, with Jasten Thenon taking over at quarterback.

Tenth is a bet on that returning class, not on last season.

Where this actually goes

Now the part that is opinion, and we will own it as ours.

Bishop Gorman is expected in the Overtime Nationals field in December. Read that alongside a schedule of Bosco, Columbus, Lone Peak and Mater Dei, and alongside thirty local programs declining to play the Gaels at all, and the shape of it becomes obvious.

Nobody forced Gorman to build a national schedule. Nobody forced thirty schools to leave. Each made the other inevitable. When your state cannot give you a game, you go find one. When a program cannot be beaten inside its own borders, the borders stop meaning much.

For what it is worth, we are on Overtime's side of this, and we have watched it up close.

The plan last year was four teams. Bishop Gorman was supposed to play Corner Canyon, and IMG Academy was supposed to play St. Frances. IMG backed out. Gorman could not get its administration aligned in time. East St. Louis was dealing with a run of injuries. What was left was Corner Canyon and St. Frances, and it was announced so late that Hunter Mandel walked into the Utah state championship game and announced it on the field after Corner Canyon had just won.

It was not a clean process, and not everyone wanted it. Some Corner Canyon players did not want to play at first. Eric Kjar did the obvious thing, which is the thing he has always done, and kept it about the team. Either everyone played or nobody did, and the decision was theirs rather than his. They played. We understand the sentiment inside St. Frances was similar.

And the thing worked. Everyone who was in that building in Baltimore got a real event, well produced and genuinely entertaining, whatever they thought of the outcome.

The usual objection is that this is too much to ask of teenagers. We think it is backwards. Roughly seven percent of high school athletes ever play a college sport. On those two rosters the number was far higher than seven percent, and it still did not matter, because for some of those kids that was the last football game they will ever play. That is the argument in one sentence. If a kid wants the lights and the cameras and one game that decides something, we cannot find the case for telling him he has had enough.

Mandel wants to grow it to sixteen teams. He should. The market will settle whether it works, as markets do, and ours is a bet that plenty of people will watch.

So here is the forecast. Media rights, NIL and television are already assembling a tier of programs with more in common with each other across four time zones than with the school twenty minutes away. Sooner or later that tier stops pretending to belong to a state association and plays a national schedule outright, closer to a small professional league than to the college model. Regional powers, a national bracket, everyone else playing a different sport underneath.

Absent Congress or a governing body deciding otherwise, that is the direction. Nevada just got there first, because thirty principals said so out loud.

Bookmark it.

And three things we got wrong

Foothill at nine. An Open Division semifinalist below a 4-6 team is not defensible.

Las Vegas High is not on this board and went 10-2. Jose Cerriteno's Wildcats lost to Faith Lutheran in the region semifinals and return UNLV commit LaDarian Bell and receiver Dasean Deayon, who had 851 yards and 18 touchdowns.

Centennial and Shadow Ridge are missing too. Centennial went 7-5 with Minnesota commits Jayden Thomas and Maxwell Miles and UNLV commit Laseth Bryant. Shadow Ridge went 8-3 behind Washington State commit Colton Richter.

This board locked on Aug. 6 and it stays locked. It will look different the next time we publish it.

Tell us who we have wrong.