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# Week 1 Overreactions: Football is Back, with Mike Mandell
- URL: https://www.mainebasketballrankings.com/week-1-overreactions-football-is-back-with-mike-mandell/
- Published: 2026-09-07T04:17:42.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-07T04:17:42.000Z
- Description: The Maine Basketball Rankings Podcast
- Author: Lucas McNelly
- Tags: The Maine Basketball Rankings Podcast

It's the return of a season tradition: each week during the football season, I bring on a member of Maine's high school football media to wildly overreact to that week's results — with the standing disclaimer that some of these takes will look very wrong in three weeks. This week's guest is **Mike Mandell** of Varsity Maine / Central Maine / Maine Trust for Local News, breaking down a jam-packed Week 1 slate.

#### In this episode:

- Why Week 1 power rankings are inherently wonky — Thornton Academy's 56-0 win over a not-good Scarborough team, and the tension between rewarding results and predicting future performance
- **Belfast** snaps a 20-game losing streak with an overtime win over Brewer
- **Gardiner** dominates Nokomis behind a big game from Connor Bernard and a strong defensive performance
- A trio of statement wins: **Greely** blows out York, **Leavitt** pulls away from Mt. Ararat, **Lawrence** throttles Gorham 48-0 in a game that lasted five minutes
- The "young star quarterback" theme sweeping central Maine — Isaac Medor, Drew Lindquist, Devin Giroux, Austin Lancaster — and comparisons to the Parker Moran/Tatum Doucette class of a few years back
- A rundown of the class-by-class landscape: Class A (Thornton Academy, Bonny Eagle, Noble over Dover NH), Class B (Falmouth vs. Kennebunk's classic rivalry continues, Edward Little as a potential surprise team, Westbrook's title defense begins with a loss to Cheverus), Class C (Camden Hills' move up from 8-man), Class D (Madison, Winthrop, Freeport), and 8-man football (Yarmouth, Old Town, Maranacook, Stearns)
- Reflections on injuries already piling up around the state (Anderson Noyes at Cony, Kollin Donlin at Medomak, and others)
- A detour into the Michigan–Wisconsin clock controversy, since Mike's a diehard Michigan fan working through the stages of grief
- Early-season basketball buzz for both boys and girls across central Maine, including Valley's girls team and the Greely boys
- Mike's travel schedule as a reminder of just how much ground high school sports media covers in a single week

#### Also in the intro:

- A reminder that our live-scoring tools are free to use for any game in the state — as long as rosters are uploaded — and that Lucas used the field hockey scorer himself for Saturday's Gardiner–Lincoln Academy game, complete with an auto-generated PDF report ready to send to parents or local papers
- A plug for site subscriptions and the t-shirt lineup

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*Listen wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes continue throughout the football and basketball seasons.*