I wanted “Friday Night Lights” to answer one question: Why football? Specifically, why on earth would people care so much about football, and especially about a small town high school football team? As such, I’d like to talk about what I think football meant to the town of Odessa in the film “Friday Night Lights”.

The film makes the point early and often that football represents a unique opportunity for the Odessa-Permian players. One of the opening scenes shows the quarterback, Mike Winchell, reviewing a book of plays with his mother, who then pointedly asks if he is going to get a scholarship. Don Billingsley’s father, who in the film is a high-school football state champion, tells his son to enjoy his senior year playing football, essentially telling him that he will never get another opportunity like this and that he should make some memories while he can.

Odessa’s football team seems to fill a void for the town: Odessa might lack economic opportunities, it might not be famous or cosmopolitan, but when it comes to football, Odessa-Permian can win. And when the Permian-Panthers win, the whole town wins vicariously through them. Watching the film, I could understand why the Odessa-Permian fans would feel such an intense “local-nationalism” for their town and team. That said, the film is not uncritical of the Odessa fans’ football hyper partisanship, and does an excellent job of showing how toxic it is. In one particularly striking scene, Coach Gaines’ daughter asks if the family will have to move if the team loses the big game. Clearly, Coach Gaines’ has experienced some truly reprehensible behavior at the hands of the disappointed football fans in the past.

I do not enjoy football, but watching Friday Night Lights made me understand why the Odessa-Permian players played, and why the fans cared so deeply about the outcome of their play. The film humanized all its characters, and made it impossible to feel the same easy contempt that one might feel for Philadelphia Eagles fans breaking things because their team won.

That said, the film doesn’t really touch on the more lasting destructive impacts of football – particularly CTE. For the people of Odessa and the other towns, football is bound up in issues of race and class and privilege. And yet, it is a terrible medium for addressing any of those issues. I think we can all agree that making children give each other concussions is not an effective way to solve any problem. The film points out some problematic aspects of football culture but does not seem to go so far as to say that football is a genuine problem. But, given what we know about the effects of football on those who play it, I think it is past time to admit that football is a problem.

Odessa-Permian loses the climactic state championship game. But, seeing how the players were getting beaten up, that’s not how I thought the movie was going to end. I thought the quarterback was going to die.