Coming off a win in Week 1, Palm Desert High School hit the road to Imperial Valley and fell behind early on Friday. Though the Aztecs scored a pair of late touchdowns to make it interesting, Central (El Centro) came away with a 33-14 football win over the Aztecs.

Palm Desert is now 1-1 and will play Elsinore at home on Friday.

“We fell behind early,” Aztecs head coach Rudy Forti said, “and just dug a hole that we couldn’t get out of.”

Senior quarterback AJ Rivera threw a 15-yard touchdown pass to Trey Boulton to put the Aztecs on the board early in the fourth quarter. Senior defensive back Angel Rangel then forced and recovered a fumble that he returned 30 yards for a touchdown.

But it was a matter of too little, too late.

“I thought our defense played very, very well,” Forti said. “And our offense sustained drives. We missed two scoring opportunities in the red zone and that was a key to the game.”

For the Aztecs, the defensive touchdown was their third in two games this season. The Palm Desert offense, on the other hand, has scored just twice in the two games.

Friday’s game, Forti said, was a tough one, against a tough opponent. The kind of opponent that will help Palm Desert get a little better.

“That’s a tough place to play with a tough crowd,” Forti said. “You have to play a near-perfect game to come out of there with a win.”

Takeaways

The first takeaway is that the Aztecs’ defense, as we suspected, will again be a difficult unit in the Desert Empire League, if it can stay healthy. We figured as much prior to the start of the season and we’re seeing it play out as most anticipated.

This week, Palm Desert didn’t hold Central to under 14 points, as it has with five of its previous seven opponents, dating back to last season. But the ability to generate points until the Aztecs’ offense finds its strengths will be a huge benefit for this team.

That leads us into our second takeaway, which is that Palm Desert will need to find ways to generate more offense for this team to reach its full potential. The Aztecs averaged just 21.6 points per game in five DEL games last season, and they still won a share of the league title. But by the early look of the five other teams in the league, that might not be enough this season. The league looks like it’ll be more competitive, and 21 points per game might not be enough to win it.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Takeaways from Palm Desert’s 33-14 Week 2 loss to Central