Utah Power 10, Week 2: Nobody Got In, and Almost Everybody Moved

Ten teams sat on the SPIN Utah Power 10 when we published it on Aug 13. By late Friday night, every one of them had played a football game that counted.

Eight won. Two lost. Both of the teams that lost were beaten by another team on this board, so nobody from outside the ten has an argument to get in, and nobody inside it has to go.

That is where the stability ends. Six of these ten teams are in a different spot this morning, and two of them moved four places. That is not us panicking after one week. This is a power ranking, and before anybody has played, a power ranking is a projection. Week 1 is the first time all season the board gets replaced by evidence instead of expectation, and the first look is always the biggest correction we will make. Anyone who tells you their preseason board survived Week 1 intact was not really looking.

The board

In: nobody. Out: nobody. First out: Herriman.

American Fork is up four, and the correction is ours

American Fork beat Pleasant Grove 36-16 on the road and moves from ninth to fifth.

A 20-point road win does not normally buy four spots. This one is not a reward for Friday. It is a correction. We had American Fork ninth in July, nobody else in the state was close to that low, and Week 1 gave us no reason to keep the number. Fifth is where they belonged in the first place. We would rather move four spots in one week than spend a month defending a ranking we no longer believe.

Then Friday happens, and Friday is not a normal test.

American Fork goes to Santa Ana Stadium to play Mater Dei.

Utah gets two programs of that class on the same Friday. IMG Academy, fifth in the country on our national board, comes to Highland to play Lone Peak. Mater Dei, ninth, hosts American Fork.

One program in this state belongs in that conversation, and it is not either of the teams playing them.

Corner Canyon beat IMG Academy 35-34 in Draper in August 2024, when every national poll had the Ascenders inside the top five. Last December we had the Chargers second in the country on this desk's own National Top 50, behind only St. Frances Academy, the team that would finish the season No. 1. They played St. Frances and lost 37-20. They are 11th in America on our board this morning.

That is the bar. Corner Canyon set it here, at home, against this exact opponent, and it is the reason nobody in Utah gets to call Friday impossible.

What separates Friday's two nights is where they happen. Lone Peak gets its test in Highland in front of its own crowd, on the same ground where Corner Canyon proved it can be done. American Fork has to go to Orange County to find its.

Mater Dei has a habit of removing quality opponents from games early. Two of their CIF Open Division state championships came against Serra of San Mateo, which sits third on our own NorCal board, by 44-7 and by 35-0. Serra had three weeks to prepare for the second one and did not score.

So set the bar where it actually belongs. Nobody expects American Fork to win this game, and plenty of people would be surprised if it is competitive at all. A competitive scoreline in Santa Ana would tell us more about American Fork than a 40-point win over just about anybody in Utah would. Hang around into the fourth quarter and the Cougars keep climbing, win or lose. That is not a consolation prize. Against that opponent it is the actual measurement.

Orem has the best win on this board

Orem won 16-7 at Kamehameha Kapalama, and the more we look at that game the better it gets.

Start with what Kamehameha is. The Warriors had opened their own season by beating Farrington 65-0. They came into the year fourth in Hawaii's preseason top 10 and they have climbed since. Orem held that team to a single touchdown.

Now add the circumstances, because they were not incidental. Tropical Storm Lala forced the game up a full day, from Saturday to Friday, which took a night of preparation and recovery away from a team that had just flown across an ocean. Orem played in a different time zone, in a climate nothing in Utah County prepares you for, in 20 to 25 mph gusts, on a day it did not plan for. It rushed for 67 yards. It won anyway, on a 64-yard interception return by Javoni Halalilo, a 31-yard Adrian Sanchez field goal and a 21-yard Brooks Ross touchdown catch.

Nobody else on this board won a game that hard. Orem stays third, and the space above it is thinner this morning than it was when we published this board. Corner Canyon and Lone Peak have simply been through more of these nights and come out the other side of more of them. That is the only thing between the Tigers and the top of this board, and it is the kind of gap that closes in a hurry.

Orem goes to Skyridge on Saturday night, the only board game that does not share a Friday, and it is the one we would pay to watch.

Mountain Ridge is up two

Skyridge led 20-13 at halftime in Herriman on Thursday and lost by 15. Mountain Ridge outscored our preseason No. 4 by 28-6 after the break. Jaxon Hunt threw four touchdown passes to four different receivers and Bradley Foster carried 29 times for 216 yards.

Two games last week put board teams against each other, and this is the only one the lower-ranked team won. Corner Canyon over Davis was our No. 1 handling our No. 5, which tells you nothing you did not already believe. Mountain Ridge over Skyridge was our No. 6 beating our No. 4.

Two spots is not the ceiling, it is the distance one Thursday buys. What is keeping Mountain Ridge out of the top three is that the teams above it have been asked harder questions more often and have kept answering them. One strong night against a good opponent is a start, not a body of work. Lehi on Friday, then a schedule that gets real, and the Sentinels can take the argument away from us entirely.

Skyridge is down four

This is the biggest fall on the board.

A halftime lead handed back over two quarters to a team ranked below them is precisely what a power ranking exists to react to. The rest of the state came out of Week 1 with Skyridge sixth or seventh. We have them eighth. Those are all reasonable places to put a good team that just lost, and we read Thursday as the more serious result than the others did.

Skyridge is the same football team it was before kickoff in Herriman. What changed is that we have now watched it play, and watching beats projecting every time. Skyridge hosts Orem on Saturday and can make this number look foolish by Sunday morning. We would enjoy that.

West is up two, because who you beat is the whole question

West beat Arbor View 20-14 in Salt Lake City. Arbor View is No. 3 on our Nevada board, it was the Nevada Open runner-up last season, and it had two touchdowns called back on penalties trying to come back.

Measured by who was standing on the other sideline, that is the second-best win any Utah team produced against an outside opponent, behind only Orem's night in Honolulu. West goes from eighth to sixth and hosts East on Friday.

Davis is down two, and here is the case

Davis lost 51-14 at home, which is the ugliest scoreline on this board. It is also not the whole game.

Go quarter by quarter and it reads differently than the scoreboard does. Corner Canyon won the first 0-0, the second 7-6 and the fourth 14-8. Three of the four quarters were inside a touchdown. The third was 30-0. Davis did not get beaten for two hours. It got beaten for twelve minutes, and twelve minutes against that team was enough to make the final look like a different game than the one that was played.

Davis drops two, from fifth to seventh. Against a 37-point margin that will strike some people as light, and we are comfortable with it. What carries it is the opponent. Davis lost to the best team in this state on a night that team looked like one of the fifteen best in the country, and nobody else on this board played anyone close to that. A power ranking has to price who you played, not just what the scoreboard said when it ended.

Some will hold this up against Grayson of Georgia, which this desk removed from the national top 50 entirely last week for losing a game. The two are not comparable. Grayson trailed 37-0 to a team ranked below it. Davis was tied at the half with the best team in its state. Davis goes to Fremont on Friday.

Timpview is down two, and the drop is not really about Friday night

Timpview beat Layton 40-21 and falls from seventh to ninth.

Read that carefully, because the score undersells the performance. Timpview led 40-9 in the fourth quarter. Layton scored twelve points after the game was already decided, and a 19-point final on a night that was a 31-point game with a quarter to play is a bookkeeping artifact, not a warning sign. Timpview did what it was supposed to do and did it comfortably.

The problem is what we can learn from it. Layton went 3-9 last season, 0-4 in Region 1, and is 8-26 across the last three years. Beating that team by 31 through three quarters is the expected outcome, and expected outcomes do not tell us where a ceiling is. Timpview did not fall because it played badly. It fell because American Fork, Mountain Ridge and West all produced results that answered questions, and Timpview's night answered none.

There is one more number worth sitting with. Corner Canyon played that same Layton program in the 6A second round last November and won 63-9. Corner Canyon comes to Provo on Friday.

Ninth is the number on this board most likely to be wrong by next week, and that is a statement about how little Friday night told us, not about Timpview. There is no version of that night that leaves the Thunderbirds at ninth by accident, and a competitive one moves them up in a hurry.

Ridgeline holds, and Herriman is the argument against this board

Ridgeline holds at 10. The 4A champion beat Morgan by 14, which is fine and which is not the reason it is here. Ridgeline is here because it went 14-0 last season. That claim has a shelf life and Week 1 did not extend it.

We did not have Herriman in the preseason ten at all. Herriman went 10-2 last season and lost 22-14 to Mountain Ridge in the 6A quarterfinals. It opened 2026 by beating Bountiful 25-14, and it is ranked inside the top ten everywhere in this state except here.

Herriman did not beat anybody on this board, so it does not enter this board. That is the standard and we are holding to it. But what is keeping Herriman out is a July judgment rather than an August result, and we moved American Fork four spots this week on exactly that reasoning. Herriman is at Stansbury on Friday, which will not settle it either. The Mustangs will get their chance to make this easy for us.

Week 2: two board games and two measuring sticks

Our No. 1 goes to our No. 9 on Friday. The same night, Utah lines up against the fifth and ninth teams in America an hour apart, our No. 2 hosting IMG Academy in Highland at 7 and our No. 5 walking into Santa Ana at 8. Then Saturday gets the board to itself, our No. 3 at our No. 8 in Lehi.

By Sunday morning this board will not need our judgment nearly as much.

How this board is built

The SPIN Utah 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. Recruiting rankings are not an input. Plenty of talent has lost plenty of games, and what we care about is what a team does when the night gets difficult. The board is built from results, strength of schedule, what we see on film and in the stands, the best publicly available verified statistics we can find, our own records from games we cover, and confirmed corrections from coaches and programs.

It can and does diverge from other boards. Where it does, we say why.

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