by Shilpa Saravanan, opinions editor
The Friday night lights of every Texas town, small or large, have garnered such fame that they have their own eponymous TV show. These lights, of course, are those of high school football stadiums across the state. According to the University Interscholastic League, such stadiums collectively play host to around 600 football games per week in the fall.
“Every home game, the whole school’s out yelling and cheering for the team,” junior Dawson Deere said. “The whole city comes out to watch–it’s what people do on Friday nights.”
Deere, who has lived in College Station his entire life, says that football–high school football in particular–is “definitely a Texas thing.”
Texas makes football-related news regularly: in August, for example, A&M Consolidated’s own last-minute play against Copperas Cove went viral across the country after being broadcast on ESPN. But it is stories such as that of the Texas parent who accused an opposing team of “bullying” at the end of October after a crushing defeat that emphasize the pull that the culture of high school football has on the Texas population.
“It’s a much bigger deal here,” Deere said. “I don’t think they care about it nearly as much as much anywhere else.”
Senior Toby Brummett has the experience to confirm this assumption, having played sports in five different states. Brummett’s father is in the army, so he “moved around a lot” from military base to military base, giving Brummett the opportunity to go through life in areas with vastly differing views on sports–football in particular.
“In Colorado, for example, people didn’t like [football] and they didn’t play it,” Brummett said. “In Louisiana, it was all about the band. People would leave after halftime.”
Brummett lived in Georgia and Tennessee also, and said that people there “liked” professional football, but not high school football. In short, his experiences have told him that nowhere is football “as big of a deal” as in Texas itself.
“Football is a southern thing,” he said. “But it’s centralized in Texas.”
Sophomore Kai Everett, who lived in Port St. Lucie, Fla., for one year, concurs that other states view football in a very different light than Texas does.
“People didn’t like football there. Basketball [in Florida] is about as popular as football here,” Everett said. “But there, sports are less important than school. In Texas, they’re the center of school.”
“In Texas, it’s a religion,” Brummett said.
