Utah played a full Friday and a one-game Saturday, and the weekend moved the board in both directions at once.
Corner Canyon went to Provo and beat Timpview 40-7, which means it is outscoring opponents 91-21 through two games under first-year head coach Casey Sutera, both wins on the road, both against teams from the Utah top ten. Forty miles north in Highland, Lone Peak lost 59-3 to IMG Academy in front of its own crowd. Same night, same state, and about as far apart as high school football gets.
| Result | The read |
|---|---|
| No. 1 Corner Canyon 40, No. 7 Timpview 7 | A scoreless first quarter, then 40 |
| IMG Academy 59, No. 2 Lone Peak 3 | A running clock in Highland |
| No. 9 Skyridge 21, No. 3 Orem 14 | Saturday, and 14 fourth-quarter points |
| No. 4 Mountain Ridge 42, Lehi 0 | Three Jaxon Hunt touchdown passes |
| No. 5 West 60, East 0 | 80-14 through two |
| No. 6 Davis 56, Fremont 28 | An answer to a 37-point loss |
| Mater Dei 31, No. 8 American Fork 11 | The best loss of the Utah weekend |
| No. 10 Ridgeline 31, Park City 9 | Chalk |
| Herriman 40, Stansbury 36 | First team out wins on the last play |
Corner Canyon scored on offense, defense and special teams in Provo
Jaxon Pehrson threw touchdown passes to Diesel Dart and Beckham Coon, Dart added a two-yard run, and Will Tenney returned a fumble 11 yards for a score, per the Deseret News. Timpview's best moment was a 64-yard touchdown catch by Malosi Ilaoa, and it came with 1:57 left and the game long gone.
Timpview is not a bad football team. It opened by beating Layton 40-21 on the road and it was seventh in the state on merit. Then the No. 1 team arrived and Provo got quiet.
How the Chargers got there is the part worth sitting with.
Corner Canyon has a different fingerprint than the Kjar teams did
A year ago this program's opening statement was a 96-yard touchdown from Helaman Casuga to Kai Meza on Corner Canyon's first offensive play of the season, in a 45-0 win over Bingham. Casuga told the Deseret News afterward that the play was "a little nerve racking" and that he knew it was going to be open. That was the Eric Kjar signature: score before the other team has settled into its seat, make them play catch-up, and watch almost nobody manage it.
This team does not do that.
Corner Canyon has not scored a point in the first quarter of either game it has played. At Davis it was 7-6 at halftime, a one-point game against a team that would go on to lose by 37, before the Chargers scored 30 in the third quarter. At Timpview it was 0-0 after one, and Diesel Dart's two-yard run early in the second finally started it.
Three explanations fit and there is no way to know yet which one is right. It could be conservative early play-calling, keeping things vanilla until there is something worth putting on film. It could be halftime adjustments, which is the hallmark of a staff that knows exactly what it is doing. Or it could just be a young team's habit, the kind that is charming in August and expensive in November.
What is not in question is what happens after the break. Two games, 91 points, both wins on the road, both against teams from the Utah top ten. Casey Sutera has a different way of getting to the same place Kjar got to, and so far it works.
The reason to keep watching is arithmetic. A team that spots a good opponent a half will eventually meet one good enough to make the half count. Nobody in Utah has been that team yet, and Corner Canyon still has not played at home.
Lone Peak got the number we gave it wrong, and we said so Friday night
We had Lone Peak second in Utah. IMG Academy made that look silly inside of a half, went up 38-0 by the break, and the running clock followed under the 35-point rule. Zachary Zolman's 45-yard field goal in the third quarter was the whole of Lone Peak's night. The Deseret News headlined its story on the turnovers, four of them, and it is right that the margin does not explain itself through graduation losses alone.
We published the verdict the same night rather than waiting for someone to hand it to us: right now Lone Peak is not the second-best team in Utah, and the fix starts with the board.
The board was built before Friday, and so was every other Utah board we can put a date on. That is a fact about the calendar rather than a knock on anybody, and it means the next set of numbers in this state moves more than usual.
Herriman, West and Davis all made cases on the same Friday
The most entertaining game in the state was played by a team that is not on the board at all. Herriman beat Stansbury 40-36 on a 50-yard touchdown throw to Hayes Priest with three seconds left, after Filisi Filipe had already scored four times, including runs of 68, 14 and eight yards, per the Deseret News. Herriman is the first team out, and a four-point win over Stansbury is not the argument that changes that. The 40 points are worth noticing anyway.
West of Salt Lake City did the loudest thing on the board without the ball. Derendrick Dixon ran for three touchdowns, Lester Falatea returned two interceptions for scores, and Samanu Tua'one took a punt 35 yards to the end zone in a 60-0 win over East. The Panthers have outscored two opponents 80-14, and moving them ahead of Timpview last week has aged about as well as a ruling can age in seven days.
Davis answered its 51-14 loss to Corner Canyon by putting 56 on Fremont. Brodie Scheinberg threw for 222 yards and three touchdowns and Bode Sparrow returned a kickoff 80 yards and caught an eight-yard touchdown. We took one spot off Davis for that Corner Canyon loss rather than four. Friday says one was the right number.
Mountain Ridge has beaten two Region 3 teams and it plays in Region 2
We wrote last week that Mountain Ridge's front looked improved. Friday it showed up in a way nobody can argue with.
The Sentinels shut out Lehi 42-0 behind three Jaxon Hunt touchdown passes, one of them 60 yards to Xander Thayer, who also scored on the ground. Nine days earlier they beat Skyridge 41-26. Lehi and Skyridge are both Region 3 schools. Mountain Ridge is not. It plays in Region 2 and has spent two weeks going into the state's most loaded region and beating people in it.
The honest caveat is that this is probably not the Region 3 of the last two seasons. Take Corner Canyon out and there are questions at every address. That is worth saying, and it does not erase 41-26 and 42-0. Mountain Ridge has our attention, and it is going to have everybody's before long.
The best loss of the Utah weekend belongs to American Fork
Nobody hands out credit for losing, and this desk does not rank teams on moral victories. But the best loss in the state is worth naming, and it is American Fork's.
The Cavemen went to the Santa Ana Bowl and trailed Mater Dei 17-11 going into the fourth quarter. Jake Matsen threw a nine-yard touchdown to Cash Taiese with 4:19 left in the third and Jace Worthington had kicked a 26-yard field goal. Mater Dei closed on a 14-0 fourth and won 31-11, and the number worth keeping is the one before that: down six, on the road, at Mater Dei, with twelve minutes to play.
Ask how many programs in America will be able to say that sentence this season. It is not a long list, and almost everybody on it will be ranked somewhere.
The defense is why, and the personnel says so. American Fork returns six defensive starters, four of them in the front seven, led by senior lineman Dalin Afu, who had 15 tackles for loss and five and a half sacks a year ago, per the Deseret News. That group ranked ninth in 6A last fall at 23.67 points allowed a game. Nobody in the Utah press has called that front a strength in print. We will: this is going to be a very difficult out all season, and Friday in Santa Ana was the first evidence.
Skyridge took the response window and used it
Skyridge was the biggest fall on the Week 2 Utah board, ninth after a 41-26 loss at Mountain Ridge, and the state told us we had gone too far. Saturday night in Lehi, Skyridge beat Orem 21-14 and made the argument itself.
Nine days earlier the Falcons had given everyone permission to write them off. Mountain Ridge put up 648 yards on them. Skyridge botched two punt snaps that handed Mountain Ridge the ball at the Skyridge 33 and the Skyridge 22, missed a point-after, and threw an interception in its own end zone, per the Deseret News and the Lehi Free Press. It led 20-13 at halftime and got outscored 28-6 after it. Head coach Justin Hemm said his team "made too many mistakes to a very good Mountain Ridge team."
Then it held Orem to 14 points. The Deseret News headlined its Saturday story on the bounce-back defense and that is the right frame: 648 yards allowed, then 14 points allowed, nine days apart, against a defending state champion. Nothing about Saturday proves the special-teams problems are solved. Everything about it says the defense is a different unit. That is what good coaching looks like in the second week of a season.
It opened with the kind of detail that writes itself, too. Skyridge scored first on a six-yard throw from Jagger Fountaine to Steeler Wesley, a junior tight end who played for Orem last season and now catches passes for the team across the valley. Then Skyridge went almost three quarters without scoring again.
Orem tied it late in the first half on a 27-yard Tanner Lewis touchdown pass to Po Faumui. A lengthy lightning delay at halftime followed, part of the storms that moved across Utah Valley on Saturday night, and when the game resumed it was Orem's defense that scored, a 30-yard interception return that put the Tigers up 14-7 after three quarters.
Then Skyridge scored 14 points in the fourth. Fountaine found Omarian Sanders in the end zone with 9:17 left, and Beckham Bennett ran it in from four yards out with about three and a half minutes to play.
So the ninth-ranked team in Utah beat the third on its own field, and both are 1-1. That is the most consequential result on this board since Corner Canyon opened at Davis, and it means the middle of the Week 3 Utah top ten is going to look meaningfully different. Orem is the defending 5A champion and it lost on the road to a team we had six spots below it. Skyridge has a win over a team we had six spots above it.
Mater Dei comes to Orem and Hun comes to Lehi
Orem's Saturday just got harder to look at. Its offense managed one touchdown against a Skyridge defense that had surrendered 648 yards nine days earlier. Mater Dei is not that. To have a chance the Tigers have to run the ball and play the best defense they have played in a year, against a program that just held American Fork to 11 points. The one thing working in Orem's favor is that nobody expects it now, and a defending state champion with the pressure off is not the worst thing to be.
Mater Dei of Santa Ana plays Orem on Aug. 29, one week after beating American Fork by 20, and worth knowing before anyone drives to Utah County: the game is at West High School in Salt Lake City, part of a West tripleheader, not in Orem. The Hun School of Princeton, New Jersey, visits Skyridge the same day. Before that, Friday brings Lone Peak to Skyline and Fremont to Draper for Corner Canyon's home opener, which the Chargers have reached at 2-0 without one.
Two weeks in, the top of this state is a team nobody has stayed close to and a nine-team argument about the rest. Saturday night in Lehi did not settle that argument. It restarted it.
