Central Phenix City's 62-Game Streak, Measured

Merced High beat Central Phenix City 20-12 in San Diego on September 11, and a run that had lasted since November 2022 was over. It reached 62 games and included three consecutive AHSAA state titles. The last team to beat Central before Merced was Auburn High, in the 2022 state quarterfinals. A day later Orange Lutheran beat them 21-7 at the same tournament, so a team that had not lost in nearly four years lost twice in two days and came home 1-2 from California.

Our game files begin in August 2025, so most of the streak sits outside anything we can check. What they do hold is 25 of the 62 wins, the last of them included, plus both San Diego losses and the Auburn game that followed at home. That is enough to describe how Central won, though not the whole run.

The streak numbers below come from those 25 wins only. The losses were not part of the run, so I left them out of the totals and gave them their own section below. The last of the 25 is the 39-7 win over Del Norte on the morning of September 11, the sixty-second and final one.

Twenty shutouts in twenty-five games

Between August 26, 2025 and September 11, 2026 our files carry 25 completed streak games. Central won all 25, scored 1,054 points and gave up 46.

Twenty of those 25 opponents finished on zero. Only five scored at all.

That is nowhere close to a normal rate. Across the 690 completed 2025 Alabama games there were 1,380 team-game scores, and a team held its opponent scoreless in 324 of them, or 23.5%. At Central's 80%, holding the other team to nothing was closer to the expected outcome than a competitive game was.

The margins never compressed

Median margin across the 25 streak games: 39 points. The median for the 2025 Alabama season as a whole was 20.

Measure	Central, 25 streak games	All 2025 Alabama games
Median margin	39	20
Mean margin	40.3	22.0
Average score	42.2 to 1.8	16.6 per team
Opponent held scoreless	80% of games	23.5% of team-games
Decided by 30 or more	22 of 25	31.7%

The shutout row is the one place the two columns count different things. Central's figure is the share of its own games; the league figure is the share of team-games, because in any given game either side can be the one shut out. Everything else compares like with like.

Twenty-two of the 25 were won by 30 or more, and ten by 40 or more. The largest was 63-0 over Johnson Abernathy Graetz on September 1, 2026. The most any opponent managed was Blessed Trinity's 13 in a 33-13 game in October 2025.

The postseason is where you would expect that to tighten, because the field gets better every round. It did not. Central's five 2025 playoff games, through the December 3 final, came to 231-14 on aggregate. Three of the five opponents were shut out and the other two managed seven points each. The final itself was 46-7 over Vestavia Hills.

Not one close game in twenty-five

This is the number that changed how I read the streak. Not one of the 25 streak games finished inside nine points. The closest was the first game in our files, a 21-12 win over Montgomery Catholic on August 26, 2025, and a nine-point margin is as near as anybody got across more than a year of games. Second closest is the 33-13 win over Blessed Trinity. After that the nearest anyone came was 27 points.

The only two single-digit games anywhere in our Central record come right at the end, and neither belongs to the streak:

• September 11, 2026: Merced 20, Central 12. A loss by eight.
• September 17, 2026: Central 14, Auburn 6. A win by eight.

So the streak did not erode. There was no run of narrow escapes beforehand. The results stayed lopsided right up to the weekend that ended them, which is a more impressive shape than a streak that survives on late stops and one-score finishes. These files cannot say whether a team that wins by 39 every week is any worse at winning by four. The two close games on record both came in the last two weeks, which is not enough to test it.

The field in San Diego was not the field at home

Merced arrived 12-0. Senior quarterback Antonia Lejarde had thrown for 2,182 yards and 37 touchdowns against three interceptions. The game was part of the first MaxPreps Flag Football Showdown, where Central and Glacier of Montana were the only teams from outside California.

Central had already played once that day, beating Del Norte 39-7 for what turned out to be the last win of the streak. A second game on a neutral field two time zones from home, against an undefeated team with a quarterback in that kind of form, is about as unfamiliar as the conditions get. None of that unmakes a 20-12 result, and the travel is context rather than an excuse. But the streak ended against a genuinely good team, on a stage Central had to fly across the country to reach, rather than against the sort of opponent that had produced the previous 62.

The Saturday game is the harder one to explain away. Orange Lutheran beat Central 21-7 to win their eleventh in a row and go to 14-1, and a 14-point margin is not a near miss. Three games in two days against that standard of opponent is a schedule Central had not seen all year. Losing by 14 to a 14-1 team gives a plainer measure of the gap between the Showdown field and an Alabama regular season than the eight-point Merced result does. The more useful summary of the weekend is probably just that Central went 1-2.

Neither loss is in our ratings at all

None of the three San Diego games touched Central's rating. The model rates games between AHSAA member schools, so all three California opponents are left out of the fit, along with the 33-13 win over Blessed Trinity of Georgia from October 2025.

Central's published rating has eased from 38.5 on September 9 to 37.5 in today's file, and neither California loss has anything to do with that. The only rated game in between was Auburn. Central won it 14-6 over a team the model now puts at 21.8, and an eight-point margin is roughly half of what the model projects for a 38-point side against a 21.8-point one. The whole of the one-point drop traces to that shortfall. A reader looking only at the model would see a number drift down by one point and never learn that the team lost twice in California.

Central is still first in Alabama by 4.3 rating points over Moody, and ninth of 146 rated teams in schedule strength. The top ranking is not an artifact of a soft in-state schedule.

The in-state streak is still alive

Because Merced and Orange Lutheran are both California schools, neither loss touched Central's record against Alabama opposition. Reporting put that in-state streak at 58 games when the overall run ended. The Auburn win on September 17 makes 59 by our count.

The two numbers are worth keeping apart. The 62 got large enough that testing it at all meant leaving the state, which is why it ended in San Diego and not in Phenix City. The 59 is a claim about Alabama, and neither California loss touched it. The next real in-state tests are Smiths Station away on October 7 and Prattville on October 27, currently the fourth and fifth rated teams in the state.

Data and methods

All Central figures here come from our own game records for the 2025 and 2026 seasons, using games with both scores entered, and the streak totals cover only the 25 wins those records hold, from August 26, 2025 through the Del Norte win on September 11, 2026. The two San Diego losses and the September 17 win over Auburn fall outside the run and stay out of every streak figure, though the article reports them above. The streak's length, its November 2022 start, the three state titles, both California results and the 58-game in-state count are as reported by MaxPreps, AL.com and Yahoo Sports; we cannot verify anything before August 2025 ourselves. The September 12 loss to Orange Lutheran has never appeared in the state scoring system, where schools enter their own results and out-of-state games are the thinnest part of the record, so we carry the MaxPreps score and will follow the official entry if it ever differs. That same system records the Del Norte win as 38-7, against the 39-7 that MaxPreps and the game reports give, and we use 39-7, which moves the average score by a tenth of a point and changes no margin count. Ratings and schedule strength come from the rankings published on September 18, the September 9 figure from the archived model snapshot, and a machine-readable summary of every figure above is published alongside this article. See our editorial policy for how corrections are handled.