We Cut Five Teams Monday. Two of Them Spent Friday Beating Teams We Kept.

We took American Heritage off the National Top 50 on Monday.

Friday night it beat our No. 39 in overtime.

We took Mount Carmel off the same board on the same day. Friday night it spotted St. Joseph Regional 30 points and won anyway.

Two for two. That's not a good look, and we're not going to sit here and pretend it's something else.

The week's ranked casualties

Eight ranked teams lost across two nights. Four of them lost to teams that are not on our board at all.

Thursday started it

Before any of Friday happened, two of our teams got taken apart on a Thursday.

Sierra Canyon 24, Chaminade-Madonna 7. Our No. 14 flew across the country and held our No. 25 to a single score in Hollywood, Florida. Chaminade-Madonna had climbed seven spots on Monday's board off a 49-21 opener. It did not reach double figures.

Thompson 37, Clay-Chalkville 13. This one we called, and we are going to take the credit because we do not get many of these clean.

When we put Clay-Chalkville on the board at 40 on Aug. 24, for going into Fairburn and beating Creekside 29-20, we wrote that playing No. 19 Thompson on Thursday would price it properly inside four days. Four days later Thompson won by 24.

That is what the schedule is for. A team enters the board on one road win, draws a top 20 opponent immediately, and the number sorts itself out without anybody at a desk having to argue about it.

American Heritage got its answer

Here's the part that stings, and it should.

American Heritage was 22nd in the country on our Aug. 17 board. We removed it after one August loss, a 24-7 defeat to West Boca Raton in which it scored a touchdown and nothing else. We said at the time that the call was consistent with dropping Grayson eight days earlier, and that consistency was the whole point.

Friday it went to overtime with East St. Louis, which we had just put on the board at No. 39 for ending a 19 game winning streak. American Heritage scored in the extra period and then intercepted the pass that would have answered, per Local 10 in Miami. The Alton Telegraph ran it the same way from the Illinois side.

Zack Poff at MaxPreps filed it as an upset. From where we sit it is something more useful than that. It is evidence that a team we priced on one bad night in August is better than one bad night in August.

Mount Carmel spotted them 30

The other one is worse, because the margin was bigger and the hole was deeper.

Mount Carmel sat 34th on the Aug. 17 board. It came off after losing 42-23 to East St. Louis at a neutral site, which is the same East St. Louis that just lost in Florida. Follow that chain far enough and it stops being a coincidence.

On Friday, in Chicago, Mount Carmel fell behind St. Joseph Regional of Montvale by 30 points. NorthJersey.com had the deficit at 30. It won 48-44.

We had St. Joseph Regional 35th. We had Mount Carmel nowhere. Both of those numbers were an opinion, and one of them just got audited in public.

St. Frances is first for now

The No. 1 team in America played its first game of the season Friday and spent a half of it in trouble.

DeLand tied St. Frances Academy 21-21 at the break in its own building. Vegas Brown returned a punt 79 yards to make it 21-14 before that, per the High School On SI recap, and Spec Martin Stadium had exactly the night DeLand wanted for two quarters.

Then the second half happened. St. Frances scored 14 in the third and 14 more in the fourth and won 49-35. The quarter lines read 7-14-14-14, which is a team that got better as the night went on rather than a team that panicked.

So it stays No. 1 for now. It also spent two quarters tied with a team nobody outside Volusia County had circled. Both of those things happened and we are printing both.

Santa Margarita won America's best game by a point

Five against seven. One against two in Southern California. Twenty one to twenty.

Santa Margarita opened it the way you draw it up, Isaia Vandermade knocking the ball loose from Malaki Davis and recovering it at the Centennial 32, Adrian Petero finishing from a yard out, per David Albano at the Orange County Register. Centennial of Corona scored six in the fourth quarter and still lost.

The quarter lines: Santa Margarita 7-7-0-7, Centennial 0-7-7-6. Nobody led by more than a touchdown after the first quarter. It is the fourth straight time Santa Margarita has won this matchup.

The Los Angeles Times called it a battle of greatness. For once that is not too big a phrase for a high school football game in August.

Allen ended Duncanville's night early

Our No. 23 beat our No. 9, and it wasn't close.

Allen 26, Duncanville 7, at Eagle Stadium. Both teams were opening the season. Only one of them looked like it.

Duncanville was ninth on our board and had not played a down all season, which is exactly the kind of number Friday nights exist to settle. It got settled.

The rest of the national board

St. John Bosco 45, Roman Catholic 25. Bosco scored 31 points in the second quarter. Read that again. The quarter line is 7-31-0-7, which is the most Bosco sequence imaginable: an even first quarter, a violent second, then coasting. It is 1-1 now and the loss is to the No. 2 team in the country.

Lee County 23, Miami Carol City 20. Our No. 17 was shut out in the second half in Leesburg, Georgia. Carol City was already the widest gap between our board and Florida's own, and this does not help the argument.

Folsom 23, Cardinal Newman 17, in overtime. Our No. 44 needed an extra period against a team that is not ranked anywhere, with Brody Rudnicki carrying it five times in the overtime, per the Sacramento Bee. The Press Democrat's headline said Cardinal Newman pushed Folsom to the brink. It did.

De La Salle 35, Serra 25. Serra of San Mateo led 14-7 after a quarter. De La Salle scored 14 in the fourth to end it.

Mission Viejo 77, St. Paul 12. McCallie 67, St. Mary's Ryken 17. Oakland 50, Centerville 20. Don Bosco Prep 38, Armwood 14. Brownsburg 31, Rabun Gap-Nacoochee 15. Five ranked teams doing what ranked teams are supposed to do to unranked opponents, which is worth saying out loud in a week when four of them did not.

Corner Canyon 49, Fremont 0. Jaxon Pehrson threw five touchdown passes and Utah's best team ran the mercy rule on its first home game of the year. It is 3-0 and it has not been within four touchdowns of anybody.

What Monday looks like

We don't know yet, and anybody handing you next week's rankings on a Saturday morning is making it up.

The board gets rebuilt Monday, off the entire week, not off the loudest result in it. Eight ranked teams lost. Two teams we removed four days ago beat teams we kept. A 0-0 team at No. 9 finally played, a No. 17 got shut out for a half, and a team that entered the board Monday was beaten by 24 on Thursday. None of that turns into a number until the whole thing is on the table at once.

We have also been on the wrong end of moving too fast. We dropped Skyridge hard in Utah two weeks ago, the entire state told us we had overcorrected, and then Skyridge went out and beat the No. 3 team in it. Swinging too hard at a Friday is its own kind of error.

So no promises this morning. Just an acknowledgment that the middle of this board got audited in public, and the people doing the auditing were teams we had already dismissed.

Monday, with the work shown, same as always.

SPIN's National Top 50 was locked Aug. 24 and published Aug. 25. Every score in this piece is verified against two independent publishers. Churchill County at South Tahoe remains unresolved and is deliberately absent from our board.