Each week on Thursdays (or Friday morning), we might pick one game involving a team in the Top 50 of our state rankings that we think has the best chance to suffer an upset loss. We’ll see if we can nail a few of them during the season. Picking 70 percent of wins is easy for any prep writer. But just stick to upsets and it’s not so easy.
UPSET SPECIAL OF THE WEEK
No selection this time
Maybe because we were so wrong last week in choosing Bishop Amat to upset state top 10 Rancho Cucamonga (the Cougars won 31-7) there just isn’t a game this week we’re willing to risk losing to fall to 1-3 on the season.
There were some possibilities and here they are and why we didn’t pick any of them:
Rancho Cucamonga at Citrus Hill. Both are unbeaten and Citrus Hill could knock off the Cougars, but definitely didn’t want to pick the same team to lose two weeks in a row.
Alemany (Mission Hills) at Serra (Gardena). While we really like the way Alemany played in its upset bid last week against Oaks Christian, Serra is too hard to go against playing at home in Mission League games.
San Ramon Valley (Danville) at California (San Ramon). SRV is No. 22 in state and has looked great so far, but it might not be much of an upset if California were to win. The Grizzlies did beat the Wolves 37-7 last season and haven’t lost to them since 2011. We do think this is one of the best SRV teams in many years, however, and that it should reverse those trends.
It wouldn’t really be an upset, either, if Del Oro were to beat Granite Bay and Central Catholic were to beat Manteca in the CIF Sac-Joaquin Section. Del Oro and Central Catholic are lower-ranked by us, but not by everyone.
Upset Special Record So Far This Year: 1-2 (had it correct that Oaks Christian would defeat Edison of Huntington Beach, but wrong for Serra of San Mateo to upset Pittsburg and wrong for Bishop Amat to upset Rancho Cucamonga).
Note: We may start picking upsets for projected section championship teams once we start doing projections for the various CIF state bowl games.
One Comment
Mark,
I thought your Amat pick was a good one. The problem is that they have been for some time quite unpredictable. You just never know when they will bring it. Or, when they will have a sub-par game.