Look at High School on SI’s 2026 preseason New York Top 25, and the story practically writes itself: New York City and Long Island don’t run this list anymore. Upstate does.
Count it up, here’s what it looks like north of the 5 Boroughs and Long Island: Iona Prep sits at No. 1. Christian Brothers Academy of Syracuse is No. 2. St. Francis, out of the Buffalo area, is No. 3. Rye checks in at No. 6, Somers at No. 8, CBA Albany at No. 9, and Canisius rounds out the top 10. That’s seven upstate and Westchester programs inside the top 10 alone. Zoom out to the full 25, and the number climbs to 13: Archbishop Stepinac, Brighton, Bronxville, Shenendehowa, Bennett, and Monroe joining the group further down the list. Thirteen out of twenty-five. A majority of the entire state’s preseason rankings belong to programs north of the city and off the Island.
And this isn’t a group of programs riding hot streaks nobody expects to continue. Author Kevin Smith frames the entire class as “defending champions everywhere,” and the résumés back it up. CBA Syracuse enters the season on a 41-game winning streak, three straight Class AA state titles and four out of the last five, led by senior quarterback Gradyn Dixon, who completed 70.5% of his passes for 1,864 yards and 26 touchdowns a year ago. Rye is chasing its sixth state crown after winning its second title in three seasons. Bronxville just won its second state title in program history at 12-0. Monroe, out near Rochester, delivered the program’s first-ever state title behind a quarterback, Terrell “Pooty” Cunningham, who threw for over 3,000 yards and accounted for 45 total touchdowns.
Canisius checks in at No. 10 off a 6-5 season, the clear outlier record-wise on this list, and it’s there for one reason: Elijah Kimble. Smith’s writeup notes Kimble has averaged more than 1,000 yards and roughly eight touchdowns a season on nearly nine yards per carry across three years of prep football, production that helped land him a Syracuse commitment over Ohio State, Indiana and North Carolina this offseason. A program can miss the postseason picture entirely and still make a statewide Top 25 when it’s got a player like that in the backfield.
Meanwhile, the traditional city and Long Island powers are still well represented, Monsignor Farrell, Erasmus Hall, Massapequa, Ward Melville, and Garden City’s absurd 66-game winning streak among them, but they’re no longer running the table the way conventional wisdom about New York high school football would suggest. This is a genuinely balanced, statewide sport, and upstate isn’t just participating. It’s setting the pace at the very top.
That matters beyond bragging rights. CBA Syracuse sitting at No. 2 says as much about the talent pipeline feeding directly into Fran Brown’s program a few miles down the road as anything happening at the college level. Canisius producing the state’s top-ranked back the same year he commits to Syracuse isn’t a coincidence, it’s a pattern. Upstate football isn’t just competing on the field. It’s producing the exact players who go on to define the college programs this state cares about most.
Which is exactly the space Play D.A. New York’s “Friday Night Films” wants to fill. Programs like these have been putting together elite seasons for years without the daily statewide attention that Long Island and NYC powers have always taken for granted. A list like this is proof the talent has never been the problem. The coverage has been.
