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. Sixty-two games, with three consecutive AHSAA state titles inside them. 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. Enough to describe the shape of the winning, if 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%. Shutouts are ordinary in this sport. Roughly half of all games have one in them somewhere, which is what makes the Central number read so strangely. At 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. No run of narrow escapes warned that the field was catching up. 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. There is an obvious hypothesis sitting in that, and one game cannot test it: a team winning by 39 every week gets no practice at winning by four.
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, and the second loss says more about the distance between the Showdown field and an Alabama regular season than the first one 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 AHSAA competition, so Del Norte, Merced and Orange Lutheran are all flagged non_ahsaa_opponent and dropped, 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. A 14-6 home win over a team the model now puts at 21.8 came in well under what it expected from a 38-point side, and winning by eight where the model looked for roughly twice that is what moved the number. Both games that ended a four-year unbeaten run are invisible to the ratings, and the next rated game after them did all the work. 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 were computed from data/games_2025.csv and data/games_2026.csv, using games with both scores entered. The streak totals cover the 25 wins in our files that fall inside the 62-game run, 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, so they stay out of every streak figure even though the article reports them above. The companion summary is central-streak-2026.json. Ratings and schedule strength come from the current published rankings.json, generated September 18, 2026. The September 9 rating is the archived figure discussed in the September 9 model snapshot.
The streak length, its November 2022 start, the three state titles, the Merced result, the Orange Lutheran result and the 58-game in-state count are as reported by MaxPreps, AL.com and Yahoo Sports. We cannot verify anything before August 2025 from our own files.
The Orange Lutheran result on September 12 is taken from MaxPreps. Our DragonFly feed has no record of that game at all, which is the ordinary pattern for out-of-state results: coaches enter their own scores, and a game played in California in the middle of a tournament weekend is the least likely of all to be entered promptly. Because the game is absent from data/games_2026.csv rather than wrong in it, we add it by hand where it is reported above and leave the file alone, since the pipeline rebuilds it from the feed nightly. Either way it stays out of the streak numbers. If the score later lands in the feed at a different figure, we will follow the feed and say so.
One substitution to note as well. Our feed records the Del Norte win as 38-7, while MaxPreps and the game reports have it 39-7. We use 39-7 here. Our own file is built from DragonFly, where coaches enter scores themselves and out-of-state results are the thinnest part of the feed, so the scorekeeping source is the better authority on this one. The substitution moves the points-for total by a single point, and the average score by a tenth of one, from 42.1 to 42.2. Median margin, mean margin and every margin count are identical either way. See our editorial policy for how corrections are handled.
What the streak required
Not a talent for close finishes, because there were none. What it took instead was holding 80% of opponents scoreless, averaging 42 points, and doing it again through five playoff rounds. This one did not end because the team declined. It ended when the schedule finally turned up opponents good enough, which meant flying to California, and then it turned up two of them in two days.