The bus leaves Pittsburg on Friday and gets back Saturday. That is what a game of the week looks like in NorCal this September.
Pittsburg of California, fifth on our NorCal Top 10 at 2-1, plays at Mission Viejo on Friday at 7:00 PM Pacific, at Mission Viejo High School. Mission Viejo is our 43rd nationally and seventh in SoCal at 3-1.
Why the label crossed a region
The Game of the Week franchises are editorial picks. They are not pulled off a board and they are not recomputed against one, and this week the honest answer in NorCal was that its best Friday is in Orange County.
We could have put the label on a comfortable home game and called it a regional night. Pittsburg going 400 miles to play a ranked opponent is the better game, and it is the one that will tell us something on Saturday morning.
One housekeeping note, because our beat has two of them: this is Pittsburg of California, not Pittsburg of Texas.
Mission Viejo is the biggest riser in this matchup
Mission Viejo moved up eleven places on our national board last week after shutting out Lincoln of San Diego 56-0. That is a large move off a result against an unranked opponent, and the honest explanation is that part of it is arithmetic. Six teams came off the board from the middle last week, and everything underneath rose.
The rest of it is real. A 56-0 scoreline is not a narrow escape, and a team that hangs one of those in September is usually telling you something about its front.
What Pittsburg is carrying
Pittsburg is 2-1 and it is fifth on a NorCal board where De La Salle and Folsom are first and second and both unbeaten. Fifth on that board is not a soft number.
We will say the uncomfortable part before somebody else does. One of Pittsburg's three results this season rests on a single publisher, which is why we ranked the team on it and did not print a score off it. That is flagged on the board article too. It is enough to know the season happened. It is not enough to quote.
What we are watching
Whether a NorCal team can win a September road game in Southern California. Our boards keep insisting the two regions are closer than the reputation gap suggests. Friday is a place to find out.
