Coaches know the opening week of the high school football season can often be deceiving.
Sure, the good teams usually win and the bad teams typically lose, but it's the 40 or so bubble teams in between where the first week can be very inconclusive.
You hear it throughout the preseason, coaches lamenting their team's lack of experience and how it's going to take time to adjust. Sometimes that adjustment is to a new coach or a new offensive and defensive scheme, whereas oftentimes it's simply adjusting to the speed and size of varsity football compared to sophomore and junior varsity football.
After an opening weekend featuring several surprise outcomes, it's easy to see why they're called preseason games. Teams with experience seemed to fare better than teams without.
The inexperienced teams were forced to experiment with personnel in both the preseason and during opening night last Friday. Usually a team's real strengths and weaknesses are exposed in those first 48 minutes of the season.
That's why the biggest adjustments for a football coach tend to occur in between Week 1 and Week 2. As a result, the second week is often a better indicator of things to come.
Tonight's the night we find out if Bountiful's defense is really that good, or if Lone Peak's offense is really that bad. The same thing can be said for dozens of other teams, particularly Week 1 winners like Roy, Weber, American Fork and Kearns, and conversely, Week 1 losers like Box Elder, Brighton, Provo and Bear River.
A 1-0 start often doesn't mean much since half the state is undefeated anyway. After tonight, however, we'll have a better understanding of things to come during the 2007 prep football season.
Tonight, that applies just as much to the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the state.
A packed house is expected at Bingham tonight as defending 5A champion and top-ranked Bingham hosts 5A runner-up and second-ranked Alta. Both squads return a plethora of starters, and both are coming off huge opening-night victories over respectable foes.
"The whole state is probably looking forward to that game," said Alta running back Sausan Shakerin, last year's Mr. Football winner. "I've been looking forward to it since the state championship game. It's always going to be a great rivalry now. We've started something big."
Bingham prevailed in last year's championship at Rice-Eccles Stadium 21-19.
Shakerin is expected to play in the highly anticipated rematch after missing last week's game at Spanish Fork with a knee injury. The Hawks still scored 44 points without him, but everyone knows Shakerin will need to have a monster game if the underdog Hawks hope to avoid losing their fourth straight to Bingham.
AROUND THE GRIDIRON: Wasatch and Morgan meet for the 79th time tonight, with the Wasps leading 46-30-2 ... Ogden is playing its 900th game in school history, second only to West's 920 games ... Northridge is seeking its 100th win in school history ... Bountiful coach Larry Wall is coaching his 250th game tonight, just the 10th coach in state history to reach that plateau.
PREPS ON THE WEB: Can't wait for the nightly scores? Log on to deseretnews.com/sports/hs to see live scoring updates of more than half the games in the state. While there, check out your favorite high school's own Web page, complete with the state's most comprehensive standings, schedules, results and leaders.
ATTENTION COACHES: A reminder to home coaches to please call the Deseret Morning News with the information from your game as soon as possible after the final whistle. The newspaper's local number is 237-2161; long distance is 1-800-688-2161. Coaches and statisticians are also reminded to e-mail offensive yardage statistics to prepstats@desnews.com by Monday afternoon for publication in Tuesday's paper.
E-mail: jedward@desnews.com