Columbus just beat the No. 2 team in America. Miami-Dade football is having a moment.
A 33-28 win over Bishop Gorman put the Explorers into the national top ten and reframed what this season looks like across the county.
Christopher Columbus High School beat Bishop Gorman 33-28 last week. Gorman was ranked No. 2 in the country at the time. Columbus was not ranked at all.
The Explorers entered the USA TODAY Sports Super 25 at No. 6 in this week’s poll — one of the largest single-week moves in the country — while Gorman fell six spots to No. 8. Six teams entered the Super 25 in Week 3, and Columbus was the only one from Florida.
That result deserves to be understood for what it is. Bishop Gorman is not a good regional program that happened to lose. It is one of the two or three most consistently dominant high school football operations in the United States, and it lost by five to a school on Southwest 87th Avenue.
The county has been building to this
None of this is out of nowhere. Miami-Dade has spent the last several years producing the densest concentration of Division I football talent in the country, and the programs at the top — Columbus, Central, Northwestern, Norland, Carol City, Booker T. Washington — have increasingly scheduled like national teams rather than county ones. The reward for that is nights exactly like the Gorman game. The risk is the same schedule that got Columbus ranked can just as easily undo it.
Columbus opened this season inside the top 150 of the High School Football America preseason rankings, well outside the national conversation. Beating the No. 2 team moves you into it immediately, and the poll voters clearly agreed.
What to watch from here
The county’s usual weight class is intact. St. Thomas Aquinas, just up in Broward, sits at 2-0 and remains the standard for South Florida football. The Miami-Dade programs that matter most in November — Central and Northwestern in particular — will settle the district picture over the next six weeks.
The question for Columbus is whether one enormous result becomes a season. National rankings are unforgiving of teams that climb fast; the Explorers now have a target on them for every remaining Friday night, and every opponent in the county gets to measure itself against the team that beat Bishop Gorman.
Being the hunted is new. It is also exactly what a program schedules national opponents in order to become.
Sport Spectator covers South Florida high school football throughout the season. Have a game we should be at? Get in touch.