The season stopped being theoretical this weekend.
For two weeks the top of the sport had been mostly a paperwork exercise, a handful of openers against overmatched opponents and a lot of arguing about teams nobody had watched play. Then Friday arrived, the best matchup August had to offer went to the wire in Las Vegas, a Florida academy hung 59 on a ranked team in Utah, and three programs inside the SPIN Top 50 lost to programs outside it.
Here is the weekend, in board order.
| Result | State | The read |
|---|---|---|
| No. 3 Bishop Gorman 38, No. 2 St. John Bosco 28 | NV/CA | The best game of the young season, and the lower number won |
| No. 4 Baylor School 38, No. 12 Brentwood Academy 20 | TN | Chalk, on Thursday, called for lightning |
| No. 5 IMG Academy 59, No. 20 Lone Peak 3 | FL/UT | A running clock on the road |
| No. 6 Buford 39, No. 50 Gainesville 19 | GA | Gainesville led 13-10 before 29 unanswered |
| No. 11 Corner Canyon 40, Timpview 7 | UT | Utah's No. 1 has won 51-14 and 40-7, both on the road |
| West Boca Raton 24, No. 22 American Heritage 7 | FL | Unranked, and it allowed one touchdown |
| Clay-Chalkville 29, No. 23 Creekside 20 | AL/GA | Unranked, in Fairburn |
| No. 33 Hough 15, Northwestern 10 | NC/SC | A storm-postponed opener won on the road |
| East St. Louis 42, No. 34 Mount Carmel 23 | IL | Unranked, and the third of the weekend |
| No. 38 Miami Central 23, Orange Lutheran 22 | FL/CA | A top-40 team wins by one in Orange County |
| Sandy Creek 21, Grayson 13 | GA | Grayson is 0-2, and it came off this board on Aug 17 |
Bishop Gorman and St. John Bosco delivered the game of the young season
Bishop Gorman led St. John Bosco 21-0 at halftime, watched the whole thing disappear, and won anyway. Ace Amina found Corey Hinton Jr., a player who spent the last two seasons at Bosco, for a 54-yard touchdown with 6:49 left, Maximiliano Fuentes added a 49-yarder, and 38-28 was final in front of a standing-room crowd the Review-Journal counted past 5,000 at Fertitta Field. The whole night is written up on the site already, and it holds up on a second read.
The consequence is the interesting part. The board reads St. Frances Academy first, St. John Bosco second, Bishop Gorman third. Two of those three settled it on grass. The third has not played a down and is scheduled to open Friday against DeLand. The next national board has to answer for a team that lost, a team that beat it, and a team in warmups.
American Heritage led a bad Friday for the Top 25
West Boca Raton, a program on none of the SPIN boards, held No. 22 American Heritage to one touchdown in a 24-7 win. There is no framing that improves that sentence.
Georgia added another. Clay-Chalkville crossed the state line and beat No. 23 Creekside 29-20 in Fairburn. Saturday sent a third: East St. Louis beat No. 34 Mount Carmel 42-23, and East St. Louis is not on the board either.
Sandy Creek also beat Grayson 21-13, which makes Grayson 0-2 for the first time since 2013, per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Grayson came off this board on Aug 17 and a second loss is why it stays off.
Seven teams from the SPIN Top 50 lost across three days. Three of them lost to teams outside the 50. The other four lost to teams ranked above them, which is the outcome a board exists to predict.
The counterargument is real and worth making here rather than waiting for someone else to make it: it is August, rosters are still being sorted, and the country is full of good unranked teams. Fine. Three of them beat the Top 50 inside three days, and a board that files that under noise is a board that will keep being wrong in the same direction.
Aidan McPherson ran for six and the quarterbacks took the undercard
Thomas County Central put 57 on Colquitt County, and quarterback Aidan McPherson scored six rushing touchdowns by himself, one of them a 79-yarder, per WCTV. Six.
The position kept showing off everywhere else. Alabama commit Trent Seaborn threw four touchdown passes in No. 19 Thompson's 41-14 win over Central of Phenix City. Purdue commit Amos Bradford scored Chaminade-Madonna's first two touchdowns in a win over Monarch that lightning ended early. Fletch Palmer, son of Santa Margarita head coach Carson Palmer, threw two touchdown passes in his first career start, and No. 7 Santa Margarita shut out Jones of Orlando 27-0, per SI. David Gabriel Georges carried Baylor School past Brentwood Academy on Thursday, and that one is on the site too.
Chalk held nearly everywhere else worth mentioning. No. 13 St. Thomas Aquinas blanked Western of Davie 42-0. No. 14 Carrollton beat Rome 55-7. No. 16 Sierra Canyon won 42-21 at JSerra. No. 24 Brownsburg hung 48 on Lawrence North. No. 17 Miami Carol City beat Mainland of Daytona Beach 38-3, per SI.
Where the board hit and where it missed
The misses go first, because a reader can find them without help.
Missed. Lone Peak at No. 20 was wrong, and it was said in print the same night. American Heritage at 22 and Creekside at 23 both lost to unranked opponents inside the same twenty-four hours, and Mount Carmel at 34 did the same thing on Saturday. That is four numbers the results argue against.
Hit. Baylor over Brentwood, Buford over Gainesville, Mater Dei over American Fork and IMG over Lone Peak all finished in board order. Hough at 33 won a storm-postponed opener 15-10 in South Carolina and Oakland at 36 opened with a 56-7 win in Tennessee. Miami Central at 38 walked into Orange County and won by a point, which is a national top-40 team behaving like one. Corner Canyon, moved up before any of this, has won 51-14 at Davis and 40-7 at Timpview against teams from its own state top ten.
Neither. Bosco was second and Gorman was third, and the team with the lower number won. That is not an upset by any definition this desk uses, and it is not a hit either. It is a board being told something.
Mater Dei goes to Orem, and Orem has an offense problem
The calendar gets serious immediately. St. Frances Academy is scheduled to open Friday against DeLand. St. John Bosco hosts Roman Catholic of Philadelphia in Bellflower. Duncanville goes to Allen as Texas opens, and DeSoto travels to St. Thomas Aquinas the day after. Chandler at Basha, the rematch of the Arizona Open Division final, is on ESPN on Saturday night.
The one to circle is in Utah. No. 9 Mater Dei plays Orem on Saturday, at West High School in Salt Lake City rather than in Orem, and Orem arrives off a 21-14 loss at Skyridge in which its offense scored exactly one touchdown. The other seven points came on a 30-yard interception return. Skyridge gave up 41 to Mountain Ridge in its own opener, and Orem could not move the ball on it. Mater Dei is a different order of opponent, and the Monarchs just held American Fork to 11. If Orem has not solved something by Saturday, this gets out of hand early.
And the top line starts resolving itself. The team ranked first in America takes the field for the first time in five days, having spent the best game of the month watching the two teams behind it play it.
Hold that against next Saturday. One of those three is about to look very different.
