Another week in, and another crop of surprising results and major showdowns where only one ranked team could possibly survive. As the days grow shorter, so does the list of national title contenders, with a handful of potential outliers falling by the RivalsHigh 100 wayside after a heated weekend of near non-stop playoff intensity.

• No. 18 Bellevue (Wash.) 35, No. 19 Lakes (Wash.) 14: This game was hyped as the best remaining possible game on the Washington state slate, but Bellevue proved it's not only the clear-cut most talented squad in the state, but also one of the nation's more underrated teams with a dominant win from start to finish, in every facet of the game.

• No. 91 Upper St. Clair (Penn.) 28, No. 25 Pittsburgh (Penn.) Central Catholic 24: It wasn't enough that Upper St. Clair -- a talented but not entirely overwhelming squad -- pulled off what may be the shocker of the Western Pennsylvania season by knocking off one of the nation's best teams in the playoffs. Rather, they pulled off that significant feat without the use of their starting quarterback, mounting a fourth quarter rally from a 14-13 deficit behind backup passer Pete Coughlin to emerge with a huge win in a WPIAL rivalry grudge match.

• No. 14 Grayson (Ga.) 25, Lowndes (Ga.) 17: Robert Nkemdiche is one of the nation's most prominent junior prospects because of what he does on defense, as he proved with three sacks in his squad's huge win against Lowndes on Friday. Yet, in this case, Nkemdiche may have had an even bigger impact on offense, with the big bruiser getting rare time as a running back, carrying the ball 16 times for 61 yards and three Grayson touchdowns as the Georgia sleeper continued to prove it belongs higher and higher in the national rankings.

• No. 85 Cincinnati (Ohio) St. Xavier 35, No. 84 Cincinnati (Ohio) Archbishop Moeller 21: The rematch of this earlier heated Catholic face off went to the Bombers, with St. Xavier rallying from an early 7-0 deficit to take a dominant, 21-7 lead at halftime and never look back, earning a state semifinal berth as a result.

Usually, reaching a threshold of 1,000 yards in any stretch of time -- be it a season, two campaigns or even an entire career -- is an impressive accomplishment. That may help put what Aledo (Texas) High running back Johnathan Gray just accomplished in proper perspective: After yet another monstrous Friday night performance, Gray crossed the 10,000-yard mark for his four-year career ... with more performances still to come.

As reported by the Dallas Morning News, Gray's 321 yards during Aledo's 59-23 victory over Mansfield (Texas) Summit High in the Texas Class 4A Division II Region I state playoffs made him just the third running back in state history to rush for more than 10,000 yards in a career.

Aledo running back Johnathan Gray

Incredibly, Gray still sits some 1,224 yards behind the state's all-time leader, former Sugar Land (Texas) High star Ken Hall, who accumulated 11,232 yards between 1950-53. While that mark might seem out of reach for most athletes, it's actually not outside the realm of possibility for Gray, who would need to average 306 yards per game in the four potential remaining games he could play (if Aledo reaches the state title game) to break Hall's mark.

Of course, rushing yards aren't the only statistics Gray has been racking up at an astounding pace. The senior Texas- commitment also scored five more touchdowns against Mansfield Summit, increasing his season total to 55 touchdowns, four behind the state record he set last year. The five Friday scores also pushed his career mark to 195 touchdowns, just nine behind the national record set by former Michigan and Colts running back Michael Hart.

Gray's 1,172 points also stand just 79 behind Hart's all-time national mark, leaving that record just 13 touchdowns away (which would require Gray to score three touchdowns per game in all but one game -- in which he would need four -- to break the national record, if Aledo reaches the state title game).

Given just how prolific Gray has been during his career -- he averages more than a point-per-carry -- the idea that he's likely to slow down when the competition heats up is hardly a likely conclusion.

Usually, the holiday season brings disparate communities together and helps reinforce a sentiment of cooperation and unity. Evidently two high schools in the Philadelphia area missed that memo, with their respective football programs engaging in an edgy disagreement over when to play a district championship game.

Phoenixville football team

As reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Phoenixville (Pa.) High and Pottsgrove (Pa.) High can't come to an agreement on when to face each other in the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association District 1 Class AAA championship game. The contest must be competed over the forthcoming holiday break to set up the remainder of the Pennsylvania state playoffs, but precisely when it will be played remains in question.

The primary dispute has to do with how much time Phoenixville should be allowed to have to recover from an annual holiday football game, which it will play on Thanksgiving Eve against Spring-Ford (Pa.) High. With a Wednesday game scheduled, the Purple Phantoms want at least two full days to rest and recover before playing such an important elimination game.

That flies in the face of Pottsgrove's wishes, with the school -- which no longer takes part in a holiday contest, in part because of potential scheduling snafus like this one -- desperate to play Phoenixville on Friday night in the traditional high school football time slot.

"In this area, Thanksgiving games are big," Pottsgrove football coach Rick Pennypacker told the Inquirer. "But we gave that up. We gave it up to be a playoff team."

There's past precedent of a team having to play on short rest, too. In both 2007 and 2009, Pottsgrove won traditional Thanksgiving Day contests then fell in the playoffs just two days later.

Because Phoenixville isn't allowed to simply abdicate its Wednesday game against Spring-Ford, the dispute was headed for a makeshift tribunal on Monday to determine when the teams would have to play, and hopefully avoid the disagreement between the programs from spiraling into an even more unpleasant holiday-season dispute.

"There's no written rule on it," PIAA District I executive secretary Bob Ruoff told the Inquirer. "But when this has come up in the past we've usually moved the game to Saturday. You try to give the team that has to play in the middle of the week an extra day of rest."

On Friday night, most eyes in the football-fan world were glued on Iowa State's stunning upset of then No. 2-ranked Oklahoma State. That was a heck of a game, but it was probably only the second-best game of the night, if that.

That's because a state just to the east, Missouri, hosted a game in which two high school teams fought out a stunning, quadruple-overtime, 76-70 game in the Class 5 state semifinals. As reported by the Kansas City Star and shown in great highlight detail by Fox Sports Midwest, the game featured 11 touchdowns by one team's dynamic duo and a furious 14-point comeback by the other with fewer than six minutes remaining in the matchup. It was a rally which concluded with a touchdown pass with less than a second remaining on the clock, forcing overtime.

In the end, it was Staley (Mo.) High that emerged as a six-point victor against playoff rival Lee's Summit (Mo.) West High, which topped Staley in precisely this round in 2010 with a final-minute touchdown.

"It is the best game I've ever played in my life," LS West senior Evan Boehm told the Star. "The state championship game we played last year does not compare to this game. All credit goes out to Staley's players and their coaching staff. They did it. They took us down."

The LS West comeback in 2011 was arguably even more impressive, in large part because the defending state champion's trailed 49-35 halfway through the fourth quarter. Piloted by veteran quarterback Luke Knott, whom the Star reported ran or passed for eight scores in the game, LS West scored on touchdown passes to receiver Shaq Harrison on two consecutive drives to force overtime.

Given the offensive fireworks both teams had put up -- none more impressive than the dominant display produced by Staley quarterback Trent Hosick and running back Morgan Steward -- it was only fitting that one overtime wasn't enough to deliver a result. As it turns out, neither were two or three extra periods.

A South Florida girls cross country team missed out on a potential state title because of one of the strangest technical disqualifications to pop up in recent times: Two of the team's runners were disqualified because they unintentionally swapped the timing chips on their shoes.

American Heritage cross country runner Daesha Rogers trails in the final mile of the Florida Class 2A state cross country championship race

As first reported by the Miami Herald and South Florida Sun Sentinel, two runners for Plantation (Fla.) American Heritage School were disqualified from the Florida High School Athletic Association Class 2A state cross country championship race because they accidentally wore one of the other runner's chips in one of their two shoes.

Like a number of road races, high school cross country meets often using individual computer chips which athletes attach to their shoes to transmit an official time as they cross the finish line. The technology also allows for race officials to monitor competitors as they're on the course and make sure that no one gets off track or tries to run using a shortcut; doing so would register as an incomplete race on the shoe chip's tracking system.

In the FHSAA state cross country meet, runners were required to have a chip attached to each of their shoes, meaning that each runner was competing with both a right shoe chip and a left shoe chip (why the race insisted that a chip be present on each shoe is unknown, but it may have been used as a safety measure in case one chip didn't transmit correctly).

So how did two American Heritage runners end up with mismatched chips? Here's how the Sun Sentinel helped explain exactly what happened:

[Heritage coach Maryellen Powers] explained that each runner is given two identifying chips, one for each foot. Two of Heritage's top six runners got their chips mixed up and were disqualified.

"The girls room together and one of them must have grabbed a chip belonging to the other one," Powers said.

It's unclear whether American Heritage would have won the title without the bizarre chip mishap or just finished as a close runner-up. The Herald reported that the points lost by the two disqualified runners would have pushed the Patriots into title-winning position, while the Sun Sentinel -- and Powers -- contend that the team still would have finished behind state champion Miami (Fla.) Carrollton High.

Regardless of where it would have finished up, American Heritage eventually landed in fifth place, an impressive showing but far from the one that the team felt it would be celebrating when early reports of it winning a state title trickled across.

"[The chip mix up] put another girl in where there wasn't," Powers told the Herald. "This is disappointing from a team standpoint, and the girls will learn from this."

A high school football team in New Jersey advanced to the state championship game amidst a cloud of controversy on Friday night, after nine players who have been accused of violently beating two other teens were allowed to participate in the game after their suspensions were rescinded at 1 a.m. Friday morning, less then 24 hours before the game's opening kickoff.

Wayne Hills football coach Chris Olsen

As reported by the Newark Star-Ledger and Bergen Record, among other sources, Wayne (N.J.) Hills High defeated Paramus (N.J.) High, 48-21 in the North Jersey Section 1 Group 3 state semifinal, a result that sent Wayne Hills to the state championship game. A victory there would earn the program its eighth state title under head coach Chris Olsen, who happens to be the father of Carolina Panthers tight end Greg Olsen.

While being the father of an NFL star is often the most newsworthy tidbit cited about the elder Olsen, he has found himself in the center of a media maelstrom since October 29, when nine of his players were accused of assaulting two other teenagers at a house party in Wayne, N.J. While eight of the teenagers involved are underage and, as a result, have had their identities protected, the one 18-year-old involved -- Wayne Hills senior wide receiver Andrew Monaghan -- retained his captainship after the incident and received no punishment from the school or its football program.

There's no question that the charges against the teenagers are very serious. The attack against the two Wayne (N.J.) Valley High students sent both of the victims to the hospital and left one unconscious after they were reportedly stomped on repeatedly.

That appeared to change on the brink of the North Jersey semifinal, with all nine players involved receiving aggravated assault charges for their involvement in the violent encounter. The players were allowed to participate in the team's first state playoff game after the charges were levied -- a 48-0 shellacking of Vernon (N.J.) High -- but following public outrage at that decision, Wayne Interim Superintendent Michael Roth banned the students from all extracurricular activities on Wednesday.

Within hours of the announcement of the superintendent's ruling, the football program had been granted an emergency school board meeting to overturn Roth's decision. That meeting was held on Thursday night and, after a four-hour closed door meeting with the nine charged players and lawyers representing them, the Wayne Board of Education unanimously decided to issue a stay regarding Roth's decision, which immediately made the players eligible for Friday's game. Before the meeting had gone into a closed-door session, the elder Olsen and 60 of his program's football players were present in uniform for an open town hall meeting about the incident, at which members of the public both praised and attacked the superintendent's decision.

"The information that was presented to us raised significant concern as to whether some of the players were even present or involved with this alleged altercation," Wayne school board president Donald Pavlak Jr. told the Star-Ledger. "We heard from two independent witnesses and we saw some evidence. It made it very difficult for us to maintain the superintendent's decision at the time.

"If they are truly guilty, let the criminal justice system determine that. That is not for us to determine, whether they are guilty or not."

In the meantime, much of the North New Jersey public has continued to express outrage that teenagers who have now officially been charged with such a violent act are being allowed to continue to participate on such a high profile stage. With that in mind, the editorial board of the Star-Ledger wrote condemning the decision on Friday, with a second column from Dave D'Allesandro criticizing Chris Olsen himself published just hours later.

Those opinions -- among others -- drew the very public ire of Greg Olsen on Twitter. The tight end aggressively attacked a series of New Jersey journalists on Twitter after initial stories criticizing the school board's decision began to leak out. Those critiques have spread into a second day. Olsen has issued more than 10 Tweets supporting his father and calling editorials from outlets like the Star-Ledger "embarrassing."

A Philadelphia-area football team will take to the field for a regional semifinal without its head coach after he was suspended with pay following after one of his players was accused of committing a student code violation.

Penns Grove football coach Kemp Carr

As first reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Penns Grove (N.J.) High football coach Kemp Carr has been suspended for an undisclosed student code violation committed by one of his players. While the school refused to specify which part of the student code Carr's unnamed player had violated, two sources within the program told Inquirer staff writer Phil Anastasia that the violation was committed when Carr allowed a player who was involved in a fight at practice to compete in the team's first round playoff game in the Southern Jersey Group 1 tournament on Saturday.

Penns Grove won that matchup against Paulsboro (N.J.), 36-8, but that victory appears to have come at the cost of the team's coach.

"We want to have a full investigation and allow for due process," Penns Grove-Carneys Point school district superintendent Joseph Massare told the Inquirer.

While Penns Grove made the decision to suspend Carr unilaterally, the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association has no firm rules on whether a player who is involved in an internal skirmish must be forced to sit out future games.

Rather, it appears that Penns Grove officials interpreted a practice ground fight between two players during the heated tension of playoff preparation as identical to a full fledged school fight, which would have triggered an automatic suspension from school or related extracurricular activities.

Three high school hockey players in Maine won't be playing the sport they love this season, after a judge ruled that the Maine Principals Association hadn't discriminated against the boys by denying their request to play for the Portland (Maine) High School hockey team.

As Prep Rally reported less than a week ago, two players at Deering (Maine) High -- as well as another from Casco Bay (Maine) High -- were forced to consider life without high school hockey, after the team only fielded 5 players for the season, forcing the school to dissolve the team.

Without a high school team to play on, the players asked to be placed on the Portland team instead; it was a move that didn't seem like an over-the-top request. But the Maine Principals Association claimed the move wasn't fair to other schools, and that the players wouldn't be allowed to play for Portland.

As reported by The Forester and ABC affiliate WBLZ, Deering girl players were allowed to play on Portland's new girls' team, which seemed to be a big point of contention when the boys sued the MPA for discrimiation.

"If these boys were girls they'd be playing hockey right now", Paul Greene, who represented the boys in court, told WBLZ.

But despite the obvious double-standard, the judge still ruled against them, noting that allowing the boys to play at Portland would have given the school an unfair advantage over other teams that weren't allowed to pick and choose the top players for one team.