In honor of Super Bowl weekend, I attended the Flora Film Friday where we watched Friday Night Lights. The movie portrays the 1988 football season for Odessa-Permian high school and the struggles they faced both on and off the field. As a huge football fan generally, the most memorable part of the movie was the coach’s pep talk at half time of the state championship game. In this speech, he defines perfection not as being without flaws, but rather by not letting down your teammates. And this was the through-line for every issue off the field in Odessa. Whether it was Charles Billingsley abusing his son Don for fumbling too often or Boobie Miles attempting to play on a torn ACL, all of the problems the community faced were due to putting self above team and lacking perfection.

What’s interesting about this definition of perfection is that it completely ignores the concept of winning and losing. Rather, it is a comprehensive, long term picture of winning. The best analogy would be a war, so let’s take the American Revolution. When the British first arrived, America lost a lot generally, but built a sense of unity around the cause. Even though the losses piled up early, this information was used to get stronger and improve, so that America won more and more battles, eventually winning the war. When we look back at history, we think first about America’s victory long term. They were 1-0 in this war, even though they lost a lot of the individual battles. So this definition of perfection states that as long as you are improving your skill set, you will be perfect. And that is the kind of definition of perfection that would make me want to tackle Dallas-Carter even harder.