This was definitely not a movie I would normally choose to watch. I’ve never really been into football, especially not high school football. My school was infamously mediocre at football. We never expected to win and the homecoming dance was always more well-attended compared to the game. There were know star football players; I can only think of about five people I knew about who played football, but couldn’t begin to guess what positions, and one of them only played their freshman year.

Thus, Friday Night Lights portrayed a significantly different high school football experience. For one, none of the football players at my high school looked anything like the football players in this film. First, there’s a good chunk of freshman and sophomore boys who still look fairly prepubescent. Second, they tended to be somewhat taller and more athletically built than the average student, but it was too a much less degree. The bleachers for our field were also significantly smaller and dinkier.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand the degree of fandom people place on football. The whole town demanding the state-wide victory of a small-town team seems kind of ridiculous. People often talk about peaking in high school, and that’s what the whole town kind of feels like. They still wear their state championship rings well into adulthood, and undoubtedly still obsess over it. Their need for this high school team to win at football is definitely unhealthy. When Boobie Miles tears his ACL, Coach Gaines knows about it, but when his uncle tells him that the doctor says its fine and Gaines knows he’s a central player to the team, he lets him play. Boobie also has the mindset that everyone in Midland is out to win by any means necessary, even a doctor showing him an objective x-ray of his knee. I don’t agree with how it was done, because it definitely ruined Boobie’s football career opportunities, but Coach Gaines puts him in and he expectedly gets hurt again. It’s only after that second injury on the field that Boobie actually reflects on how his life has bene changed.

Also, I can’t fathom why the amount of physical damage football causes its players has only become a hot-topic discussion recently. Some more violent parts were hard to watch. Of course there’s going to be some degree of physical strain on any type of athlete, but the degree of damage directly caused by other players is mindblowing. I get that this was probably overplayed in the movie, but this is a part of football I just don’t get.

Honestly, this movie was a lot more emotional than I had anticipated. It really touched on the negative lives of certain small-town families like mothers suffering from mental illness and abusive and alcoholic fathers. There were definitely character-driven emotional parts of the movie that were poignant.