Start with the address, because it is the thing this game keeps getting wrong. Washington of Massillon and St. Edward of Lakewood meet on Friday at George Finnie Stadium on the Baldwin Wallace University campus in Berea. Neither team is at home. Both school athletics sites say so.
Kickoff is 7:00 PM Eastern, which is 5:00 PM Mountain.
Both are 4-0 and we have them nine apart
Washington is our 31st and St. Edward is our 40th, and neither has lost. Nine places between two unbeaten teams is about as tight as our board gets outside the top twenty, and it means Friday is a straight swap: the winner goes above the loser, and the rule does not scale with margin.
The names need a note, because both of them get mangled. The school in Massillon is Washington. Massillon is the city, and the program is old enough and loud enough that the city has become the shorthand. And St. Edward is singular, which is worth saying because the plural turns up in print constantly, including on our own art this week.
What a neutral field does to a game like this
Neither of these programs is short of an atmosphere. Massillon plays in one of the most famous high school stadiums in the country and St. Edward has a Cleveland pedigree that does not need explaining locally.
Moving the game to a college field in Berea takes something away from both of them and gives something back. It is a bigger building than either would fill on a normal Friday, and neither side gets the version of the night where the crowd does some of the work.
We weight a road win more heavily than a home win for exactly that reason. A neutral site is not a road game, and we will price it as what it is when we build Sunday's board.
What we are watching
Whether either of these teams has met anybody yet who can take the thing they do best away from them. Two 4-0 records collide on Friday and one of them stops being a 4-0 record, and that is usually the night you find out which of the two was the real one.
