De La Salle enters 2026 unbeaten against NorCal since 1991 and holder of 33 straight section titles, yet 0-for-8 in recent state finals — invincible at home, mortal the moment SoCal money enters the picture, an echo of the same forces that gutted Pac-12 football. Against that backdrop the Bay's prep season has become a study in inheritance: Maurice Jones-Drew coaching his UCLA-bound son Duece, Marcus Peters taking over his father's old post at McClymonds, Dante Perez returning to his alma mater Valley Christian — while Pittsburg keeps chasing the ghost of the last team to beat DLS, on December 7, 1991.

There is a particular kind of dominance that stops feeling like winning and starts feeling like weather. De La Salle, in Concord, has not lost to a Northern California team since 1991. Read that again slowly, because the mind wants to round it off into a figure of speech. Thirty-three consecutive North Coast Section championships. One hundred and twelve wins against three losses in section playoff games. And, buried in the record like a fossil everyone's stopped digging for, that 151-game winning streak from 1992 to 2004 — still the longest in the recorded history of American team sports, longer than anything the pros have managed.

You cannot bet on any of this. There is no line on a high school football game, and there shouldn't be — these are teenagers, and the only thing I'm putting on the record here is affection. So take this as analysis with nothing riding on it, which is its own kind of clarity. When money isn't on the table you're free to notice what's actually happening, and what's happening in the Bay this August is more interesting than any spread.

The god is beatable now, just not by us

Here is the paradox the Spartans carry into 2026. Locally, they remain unfalsifiable — a program that has turned invincibility into a kind of civic infrastructure, like the fog. But at the state level, De La Salle has now lost eight consecutive championship-game appearances, most recently to Santa Margarita, one of those SoCal superschools that recruit like a mid-major and hit like one too.

If you've spent any time grieving what Southern California money did to Pac-12 football — and I have, at length, in this space, probably to the point of tedium — the shape of this is familiar. The northern power that owns its own region and then gets systematically outgunned the moment it steps into the bright, moneyed light down south. De La Salle isn't a victim; it's a dynasty. But it's a dynasty that has learned the specific modern lesson: you can build the most disciplined program in the country, win 33 sections in a row, and still run into a roster the recruiting-industrial complex assembled specifically to beat you. The wound isn't losing. It's discovering there's a tier where your invincibility doesn't translate.

Everywhere you look, a father

What actually moves me about this season isn't the streak. It's that the whole Bay slate has quietly become a story about inheritance — sons stepping into rooms their fathers built.

Start with the obvious one. Maurice Jones-Drew — UCLA's old bowling ball of a running back, a three-time Pro Bowler, the man who led the entire NFL in rushing in 2011 — is coaching wide receivers at De La Salle. And carrying the ball for the Spartans is his son, Duece, a UCLA commit in the 2027 class who scored a 64-yard touchdown on the very first varsity carry of his life. Five-foot-eight, a hundred and eighty pounds, built like a photocopy. Duece committed to the same school where his father became a star, and he's playing his high school ball for the team his father now coaches. The inheritance is not a metaphor; it's a depth chart.

Then drive to Oakland, to McClymonds, where Marcus Peters — the former All-Pro corner, Defensive Rookie of the Year, a man who made a career out of taking things that didn't belong to him — was named head coach this spring. He's succeeding Michael Peters, his father, who spent 33 years on that staff. That's not a hire; that's a handing-down. The same field, the same whistle, one generation to the next.

Across the water in San Jose, Valley Christian turned to Dante Perez, class of 2006, an alumnus stepping in for Mike Machado after a 29-year tenure — another building deciding its future belonged to someone the building itself raised.

(One correction to the season's own press-release version of itself: the whispered "new coach at Clayton Valley" storyline doesn't hold up. Nick Tisa is still the incumbent in Concord. Not every program is changing hands. Some inheritances haven't come due yet.)

Pittsburg, and the ghost of December 7, 1991

And then there's Pittsburg, which is the most human story on the board because it's about wanting something you cannot have.

On December 7, 1991, Pittsburg beat De La Salle 35-27 in the section championship. It is the last time a Northern California team beat the Spartans. "The bus pulls up and all the horns and cheers," their current head coach Charlie Ramirez remembers — he was a linebacker on that team. "It was something out of a movie."

Since that night, Pittsburg has lost to De La Salle thirty-three straight times. Ramirez now coaches against the exact ghost he helped create. But read the recent scorelines and you feel the rope tightening: 30-23, then 10-7, then this past December, 24-17 for the Spartans' 33rd title. The margins are shrinking toward zero. Every August the same question gets asked in Pittsburg, and every August it sounds a little less like a fantasy: is this the year? I don't know. Nobody does. That's exactly why it's worth watching a seventeen-year-old carry it.

The city game, still breathing

Two more things I'll be watching, because a season is more than its dynasty.

Archbishop Riordan went 10-0 last fall and won its first WCAL title since 2000, then took the CCS Open, all behind quarterback Michael Mitchell Jr. — 10,251 career passing yards, a Stanford commitment, and now, inconveniently for Riordan, a diploma. The whole thrilling machine graduates. Who takes those snaps in 2026 is the kind of succession question that decides whether a breakthrough was a season or an era.

And down at Serra, Patrick Walsh enters his twenty-sixth year having just won a CCS Division 1 title with eleven new offensive starters, returning junior quarterback Caleb Bandel with a year of scars now behind him. Walsh is the quiet counterargument to all this talk of inheritance and disruption — a man who has simply been very good at the same job, in the same place, for a quarter of a century, while the world reorganized itself around him.

That, in the end, is what a high school season offers that the pros can't. No trade deadline, no free agency, no realignment committee redrawing the map for television money. Just kids in pads in the August heat, following their fathers onto fields their fathers left them, chasing ghosts that are exactly as old as they are. De La Salle will probably win the section again. The interesting question was never whether the weather changes. It's who's standing in it.