Nevada Power 10, Week 2: Seven Played, One Won, and the Top Four Did Not Move

Our Nevada Power 10 published on Aug 14. Seven of its ten teams played that weekend. One of them won.

That reads like a board about to be torn up. It is not, and the reason is the whole method: a power ranking prices who you played, not just what the scoreboard said when it ended. Liberty of Henderson lost in Hawaii to the best team in that state. Arbor View lost by six on the road to a Utah team we rank sixth. Neither of those results tells us the team is worse than we thought. They tell us the schedule got hard early.

The losses that cost something were the ones at home, against opponents from smaller classifications. Bishop Manogue lost to a 3A program. Faith Lutheran lost to a 4A charter school. Those two fall, and three teams that beat board members take their places.

The board

In: Churchill County, Mater Academy East Las Vegas, Palo Verde.
Out: Desert Pines (0-1), Foothill (0-0), Coronado (0-1).

It is Gorman, then a canyon, then the rest of the state

This is the one thing Week 1 did not complicate, because it was already true.

Gorman is No. 1 in Nevada and No. 3 in the country on our national board. Nobody else in this state is inside our national top fifty. The distance between the first line of this board and the second is larger than the distance between the second and the tenth, and that is not a rhetorical flourish. It is what the schedules say. Gorman plays St. John Bosco, Mater Dei and a national slate. The rest of Nevada plays Nevada, with a few trips to California.

Friday tells us something real about the gap for the first time. St. John Bosco comes to Fertitta Field at 7 p.m. PT. Gorman is 2-0 all-time in the series, 34-31 in Las Vegas in 2014 and 35-20 in California in 2016, and both of those are a decade old and prove nothing about this week.

The 41-0 win over Somerset Academy Losee proves nothing either. Lightning delayed the first quarter more than 90 minutes and arrived again at halftime, and with a running clock already going the game was called. Coach Brent Browner said the alternative was another 45-minute delay and that it came down to what was best for the players. Two quarters against Losee is not film worth ranking on. Bosco is.

Liberty and Arbor View lost, and neither of them drops

This is where a power ranking earns its keep or gives itself away.

Liberty led Mililani 24-14 at halftime in Hawaii and lost 31-24. Mililani is the No. 1 team in that state. Losing a seven-point game on the road, across an ocean, to the best program your host state has is not evidence that Liberty is worse than we had it. It is evidence that Liberty scheduled somebody.

Arbor View lost 20-14 at West of Salt Lake City and had two touchdowns called back on penalties. West is sixth on our Utah board and is quarterbacked by Kamden Lopati, the highest-rated quarterback in Utah on the recruiting boards and a five-star to at least one service. A six-point road loss to that team, in that building, is not a result that moves anybody.

Both hold. Second and third are where we had them, and we would put either one on a neutral field against anybody in this state not named Gorman.

We will name the cross-board tension rather than let somebody else find it: West, sixth on our Utah board, beat Arbor View, third on this one. Those two numbers sit uneasily together. Our answer is that West is a genuinely good football team that we may still have too low, which is a problem on the Utah board and not on this one.

Spanish Springs holds at fourth without playing

Spanish Springs went 13-0 last season and won the 5A state championship, the program's first, beating Faith Lutheran 42-23. It has not played a down in 2026. It opens at home against Carson on Saturday.

It stays fourth. A team with no result gives us no reason to move it in either direction, and we are not going to promote a program past teams that lost respectable games on the road simply because it had the week off. Nothing about Spanish Springs has been proven or disproven. Saturday starts that.

Churchill County is fifth and that is going to make people angry

Churchill County of Fallon won the 3A state title last November, 21-14 over Moapa Valley. On Friday it went to Reno and beat Bishop Manogue 32-30.

A 3A program beating a 5A regional finalist is the most disruptive result in the state. It is also two points, and we are not going to call Churchill County the second-best team in Nevada on the back of it. Some boards went further. We have them fifth, ahead of the team they beat, and that is the whole claim.

The distinction that matters, and it is the same one we applied to Liberty and Arbor View in the opposite direction: Manogue lost this game at home, to a program two classifications down. That is not a schedule getting hard. That is a result. Manogue falls two.

Churchill County goes to Reed on Friday, a second 5A opponent in two weeks, and the fastest possible test of whether Aug 14 was a night or a level.

Mater East beat Faith Lutheran over two days

The game stopped after one quarter on Friday with Mater East ahead 7-5 and finished Saturday morning at 10. Mater East won 43-35 on a one-yard touchdown run by lineman Rayshawn Brown with 1:16 left, set up by a 74-yard Marcus Williams run.

Mater Academy East Las Vegas is a charter school on East Bonanza Road and one of the seven southern Nevada private and charter programs still eligible for a state title. It enters sixth, one spot ahead of Manogue and two ahead of the team it beat.

Faith Lutheran falls from sixth to eighth for the same reason Manogue falls. It was the 5A runner-up last season and it lost at home to a school playing 4A. It goes to Bakersfield Christian of California on Friday.

Palo Verde takes the last seat, and Reed slides without playing

Palo Verde beat Desert Pines 34-18 for Dru Smith's first win as head coach, with X'Zavier McZeal catching two touchdowns. Desert Pines was eighth on our preseason board. Palo Verde is tenth on this one and Desert Pines is off it. That is the arithmetic and there is not much more to it.

Reed goes from seventh to ninth without having played. That is not a demotion and we want to be clear about it: two teams earned their way in above the Raiders, and everybody below them moved down by definition. Reed hosts Churchill County on Friday and can settle it directly.

The three teams that left

Desert Pines lost by 16 to a team we did not rank. It went 4-6 last season. It leaves.

Coronado was shut out 7-0 at Centennial of Las Vegas in a weather-shortened game. It went 3-7 last season and it was the weakest justification on the preseason board when we built it. It leaves.

Foothill leaves without playing a down, because its game against Green Valley was canceled in the storms. That is not a judgment on Foothill. Three teams earned seats and somebody had to give one up, and a team with no result and no body of work behind it is the one with no argument. Foothill hosts Basic on Friday and can play its way straight back.

Every Clark County independent on this board that played, lost

Thirty Clark County School District programs entered independent status with the NIAA for a minimum of two years. They play a schedule that ends Oct 23 with a Superintendent's Cup in each of three divisions, and none of them can win a Nevada state championship. Seven private and charter programs in southern Nevada remain eligible and play their own way to a title.

Our preseason board carried five CCSD independents: Liberty, Arbor View, Desert Pines, Foothill and Coronado. Four of them played in Week 1. All four lost. Foothill's opener was called off in the weather.

We wrote on Aug 14 that thirty programs could not play for a state title. We did not expect the first weekend to make the point for us.

Gorman is not one of the thirty. It is a private school, it is still eligible, and it is the reason the top of this board did not move.

Week 2

Nevada sends three teams to California and hosts the second-ranked team in the country at home. Ask again on Sunday.

How this board is built

The SPIN Nevada Power 10 is a power ranking, not a composite. It answers one question: who would we take on a neutral field this week.

We are measuring complete, battle-tested football teams, not collections of players. The board is built from results, strength of schedule, what we see on film, the best publicly available verified statistics we can find, our own records from games we cover, and confirmed corrections from coaches and programs. A loss to an elite opponent is priced differently than a loss at home to a team you should beat, and this week is the clearest illustration of that we are likely to get all season.

It covers the whole state, north and south, which is why it will not always look like a board built by a Las Vegas desk or a Reno one.

Corrections and roster fixes: coaches and programs can reach this desk directly and we will run them.