Why is high school football taken so seriously in the state of Texas? It seems like it almost a religious experience for them there.

I can only offer some tangential information. I worked with a guy whose dad was a small town high school football coach (although not in Texas) and he said that if the team lost Friday night, he didn’t want to go out in public Saturday because at the very least he was going to get the stink eye from everyone in town. After a particularly bad season or two, they would pack up and move on to the next town that was looking for a coach. The guy said he found the characters from the TV show based on the Friday Night Lights feature to be very sympathetic and the plot lines rang pretty true as far as his own experience went.

I originally wanted to say it was more of a small town thing than a Texas thing, that maybe people had such an investment in the town’s high school football because so many of them stayed in the town after high school rather than moving away or going off to college, so high school football was all they knew. I think you’re right, though; it is far more prevalent in Texas than anywhere else.

I knew a girl that grew up in the suburbs of Dallas and high school football was as big there as it was anywhere else. It was a rather affluent suburb with lots of people that had lived elsewhere, but had come specifically to this town to put their kids in this high school that had such a good football team.

It’s like that in Alabama too.

While I have never experienced TX football directly…I can tell you that in Ohio there is often a greater interest in the high school teams than in the college teams.

People who have no affiliation (no family attending past or present) w/ a particular school will go to the game on Friday night. Monday morning quarterbacking around the watercooler about HS football. 5pm news w/ sports broadcasters at the pick of the week. 11pm news on Fri nights: last 10 minutes dedicated to HS football. Saturday morning speciality news programs about HS football, in season.

Yeah, its a little weird, but it brings communities and families together in (usually) friendly hometown rivalries.

…and oh my. Someone from the area always goes to the state championship. That is a whole other level of mania.

Interestingly, I was listening to a piece on NPR a few weeks ago about HS football. Out west, small towns often don’t have enough kids to play traditional football. So they have gone to 6 man football. Pretty cool.

It’s a big deal in West Virginia also, and I think it’s mostly because of what jaredg pointed out: the majority of people who live here have always lived here, gone to the high schools their kids & grandkids are in now, and they’ve just been around it so long they’ve cultivated a strong connection to the sport.

It makes us all look like complete hicks, but I can see why it happens. They’ve got nothing else interesting going on.

Gee, Joey. I don’t know why a sense of belonging and familial togetherness makes you look like complete hicks…? That seems a little harsh.
Where we live, I am not that interested in the whole HS football scene…but I can tell you it makes me smile to here the ref’s whistles, the cheers and the band from across town…on Friday nights in the fall.

Maybe you need to be around it for a while to really get what I’m talking about. It’s cool to hang out with friends and rally around something, but people take it way too far in this area. It is the most important thing in many people’s lives; they’ll talk about last night’s/week’s/year’s game until they have a new one, and that’s it. People who couldn’t care less about voting, civil rights, or pollution place bets and start fights about some teenager who can throw the ball farther than some other teenager.

I played sports in high school and I enjoyed it, just like I enjoyed going to some of the games I didn’t play in. It’s just really surprising how seriously some of these people take what is supposed to be a leisurely pastime.

And admittedly, I take any chance I get to belittle West Virginians, so I may have been snappier than necessary there.

Yeah…I do kinda get what you mean. My husband is from MI and it took alot of eye rolling from me before he would quit commenting about how much people go on and on about HS football around here… I think it pained him all the more as noone follows hockey here :(

BTW I meant ”hear” ^^^^, blue freedom. :)

It’s like that in western PA as well. Highlands Golden Rams undefeated; 9–0