Week 1 Overreactions: Football is Back, with Mike Mandell

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

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