Las Vegas High School Football Games - Week 3 - 2026 | #1 Palo Verde is 3-0

Last week we made Palo Verde the #1 team in our FSM Independents Top 10 Rankings. Man, half the city jumped on our heads. Now, what? There’s one team on that list that’s 3-0, and their strength of schedule IN LAS VEGAS is looking pretty damn good to this writer. First, let’s take a Friday night ride around the Valley.

Week 3 High School Football Games:

Our NIAA No. 8 went to No. 7 and won it as the clock hit zero.

GV Christian beat The Meadows 18-13, and the ending was ridiculous. The Meadows led 13-12 in the fourth quarter. GV Christian scored with no time left on the clock. That is the whole game in one sentence.

It was a 6-0 first quarter and 0-0 second quarter, which tells you what kind of night it was for both offenses until the third, when they finally put some more points on the board.

Sloan Canyon welcomed Pasadena’s John Muir to Tortuga, Henderson, and sent them to Davey’s locker with a 35-20 win. The Pirates are for real again, ladies and gents.

Silverado and Coronado bounced back with 54 and 55 points apiece in blowouts over Cimarron-Memorial and Canyon Springs, respectively, and we have photo reels dropping from all three of these games plus Centennial’s HUGE 74-41 win over Burbank on The Hill, and Chaparral beating the brakes off Western 51-0.

Foothill was down 24-21 in the fourth at Spanish Springs and came back to win 28-24.

Legacy beat Reed 41-37. Mater East handled Victor Valley 26-7. Somerset Losee survived Douglas 21-20. Clark beat Virgin Valley 27-12.

It was uglier elsewhere. Las Vegas lost 63-0 at Mountain View in Arizona. Faith Lutheran lost 46-9 to Valor Christian. Pinecrest Cadence lost 49-0 to Lincoln County. Spring Valley smacked up Bonanza 42-7. Valley View beat up on SLAM 55-12; Desert Pines put damn near a sixty burger on Cheyenne, dog-walking them 59-6. And Shadow Ridge (AZ) brought the new kids on the block, CIVICA, back down to earth with a 58-19 drubbing. Valley put up 40 points and 446 total yards of offense on Rancho and beat them 40-21, though the game was called early for a serious injury to a Rancho player. There were two instances in the game where ambulances were called.

The #1 team in the country, the Bishop Gorman Gaels, are in Miami later this afternoon against Columbus in what should be the best high school football game in the nation this week. There’s film running around the internet of the team from South Florida welcoming the smoke… I hope they have ventilators on their sidelines.

The game is at 11am PST on ESPN.

We’ll be rewarding these out-of-state blowouts in our FSM Top 10 Rankings come Monday. A couple of teams responded to being left out of the ranking last week. In those cases, we’ll eat a lil’ crow. Lemon-pepper, please.

FSM Prep Rally Game of the Week: #1 Palo Verde Panthers vs #6 Desert Oasis Diamondbacks

Palo Verde Head Coach Dru Smith spent the week working on his run game. “I always love running the ball. I challenged our offensive line at the beginning of the week that we needed to run the ball better.” Palo Verde went out Friday night and ran it straight down Desert Oasis’ throats.

The Panthers won 42-18. They are 3-0, and nobody outside their own building saw this coming. This week they ran the ball just like their skipper wanted them to.

Junior running back Rio Pascal gashed the Diamondbacks over and over again to the tune of 177 yards and three touchdowns and was our player of the game. Sophomore quarterback Cooper Roberts had 78 rushing yards and added a 37-yard rushing touchdown run of his own. That was the night: Palo Verde decided they wanted to run the rock, and Desert Oasis could not stop it.

The Panthers rushed for 311 yards, but the defense showed out too 😮‍💨

Palo Verde intercepted Diamondback QB Preston Helsham four times. Jayson Eliason, Christian Bell and James Eliason each had one. The scoreboard tells the rest. Desert Oasis got six on the board in the first quarter and then did not score again until the fourth, by which point this thang was over. Palo Verde outscored them 29-0 across the second and third quarters. The defense was stingy all night and was exactly what our inaugural FSM Athlete of the Week, Beau Gardineer, said his unit needed to be in his interview with our Hannah Serquina: Mean and Nasty.

Wide receiver Anthony Sarracino, with a monster 7 catches for 158 yards, tried to keep Desert Oasis in it. He and Senior Xavier Mullikin, who scored the Diamondbacks’ first touchdown, have been the guys for them all season, but 12 fourth-quarter points against a team already up 36 was just the Panther Stadium scoreboard being polite. That being said, Palo Verde intercepted D.O. QB Preston Helsham four times. Jayson Eliason, Christian Bell and James Eliason each had one.

Understand what Coach Smith has done here. Palo Verde went 3-7 last year. He is a first-year head coach, only the third this school has ever had, and he cut his teeth at Bishop Gorman. Three weeks in, his team has beaten Desert Pines 34-18, held off Legacy 28-26 on the road, and now hung 42 on a ranked opponent that came in wanting revenge for a playoff loss a couple of years back. Rio Pascal is running behind a line that is clearly getting coached up.

Palo Verde is our No. 1 in the CCSD Independent Top 10. After Friday, that is not a reach… As if it ever was. The Panthers are 3-0. Nobody else is.

Make sure you keep coming back to FSM for all your 702 High School Football games coverage. Thanks for visiting FranchiseSportsMedia.com for your Las Vegas Sports news today.

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– TQ – Franchise Sports Media

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