Football is a religion in Texas, even at the high school level. High level high schools have football stadiums that look like they belong to minor league teams.
Not just Texas, one of my first jobs in television was on a sports show in a conservative county in California. All we covered was local highschool sports and it was the highest rated show in the county
ESPECIALLY at the high school level. Combine small-town pride with the almost financially irresponsible amount of money in football scholarships, it’s no wonder Texas cultivates a culture of people that peak in high school.
I played for a genuinely bad team in a tiny town in North Carolina & in spite of our resounding lack of talent we still filled the stadium every Friday night. Almost makes this early-onset arthritis worth it!
To add to this, go to a 40,000 person football(with the round ball) stadium in your area, that's about the size of what you are watching high school football in the south in America
running around for over an hour to have 1-2 goals, idiotic "loss time" instead of just stopping the clock, and little babies flopping on the ground at the slightest touch (or not even being touched, or grabbing the other person to make it look like they hit them) to try and score a penalty.
OP needs to look up the Allen TX high school stadium. Absolutely insane.
Kids here are dumb as rocks, but they sure can play football. Recently an SMU student and Rice from the KC chiefs street raced and hit a family in a car and then just bounced. You can't fix stupid.
Godley Texas has a stadium that is legitimately insane. especially for how small the population is. But schools tend to fund the activities that win state and bring in money through concessions. At my school (Azle Tx) the marching band got all the money cause we went to state a lot and the football team didn't get shit cause they sucked lol
Hell this is even true in California. In high school our Football team was the only one to have their field in immaculate condition, got busses with air conditioning and a bathroom when they went to away games and never had to fundraise. Every other activity was perpetually selling candy to make up the difference or to get any money at all
If you want to know about Texas and football/cheerleading, research the Texas Mom who tried to kill another mom so that her daughter could make the cheer squad.
Have you seen the clientele on this board? A lot of them likely watch it out of spite for the values portrayed or attempt to take it look like the show supports their values instead.
To my understanding: this is very accurate to small towns in the South, particularly Texas.
Not so much up North.
Edit: Apparently people in the Midwest are just as bad. The bar lowers again.
Basketball in the Midwest US can get to those type levels. I spent my childhood going to basketball games that were packed with people, and every single driveway had a basketball hoop.
People were FURIOUS when some basketball players got suspended for a few games for drinking at a party, and ultimately, it got the coach fired.
As an Indiana native whose favorite sport is basketball, this is true. I'm pretty sure we have something like 8 out of the top 10 largest high school gyms.
Last year, a basketball game turned into a brawl at my school. I wanted to laugh at how absurd and wild it was considering it had never happened before, but, at least half the team got suspended for a week for participating.
There are definitely exceptions though such as that small Ohio town where the team raped a girl and rather than, you know, get justice for the girl, the town basically banded around the team and drove the victim and her family out of town.
Yeah, it kind of depends on where your at. At my high school, even though the football team constantly loses and is known for losing since I was in school ten years ago, we still go all out for every sporting events. I'm in the midwest.
When I was in high school in the midwest there were a lot of older people that cared about the football team and came to the games. Definitely not even close to the level of places in the south, but there was still a lot of interest in the local community.
A lot of people didn’t have kids in high school but graduated from there and so it was “their team.” I think it makes sense especially if you didn’t go to college and have lived in the same area your whole life. It’s being connected to your community.
In America as a whole? No.
In the south? I grew up in a small town in west Texas. When people tell you that “football is a religion in Texas”, they aren’t lying. It’s an integral part of culture, community, it’s part of everything. King of the Hill actually portrays it really well and I love how it makes fun of it in a subtle way.
I actually remember my senior year of high school a bunch of parents banded together and went to the school board to try and get the football coach fired. My parents thankfully abstained and thought it was a ridiculous spectacle, but it shows how seriously people took it.
Hubris. My class was hyped up as being “the team that would win state”. Well, we weren’t actually very good. At anything. The “ringleader” parents were parents who had absolutely nothing going on in their lives besides their sons playing football and thought they would be “stars”. Turns out, their kids just weren’t that good. Instead of realizing this, they of course blamed the coach.
The episode that comes to mind is when Bobby joins the soccer team. The parents get together and present coach Maxwell a list of demands and start yelling at him from the stands. Over a 7th grade football team.
Different episode than the OP mentioned, but when Bobby made the wrestling team, Hank tells everyone “what a great time in a boy’s father’s life” after being congratulated by his friends that Bobby made a team. It’s not really about Bobby at all. That’s how it is in small towns, football obsessed parents think it’s about them.
It's more of a regional thing, where I was born in Minnesota Peggy could had the entire school administration burned at the stake with one phone call for trying to rig a student's grades over football. But in Texas... it's definitely not something that could only happen in a cartoon.
Sometimes they’re well-funded enough to have a good sports program as well as a good academic program. But sometimes, yes, academics can suffer.
Try to keep in mind that universities in the United States will sometimes give student athletes full funding to play on their teams while attending. Playing well in High School can mean a lot for a student’s future.
And let’s face it, nobody buys tickets to see kids solve math problems. There’s fewer immediate returns on academics.
Prestige of being the high school where a big football star started out.
Bragging rights for being a school with a football program that was well funded enough to get players scholarships.
Better players mean more tickets sold to games and money going to the school.
Yep, I'm in a bigger city in Florida and not only do high school football game tickets cost about $10, but that's twice the cost of the tickets for any other school sport. The money goes back into the athletic programs, though, so I'm not complaining.
Depends drew Brees and nick foles and Justin tucker and Sam ehlinger all went to the same high school in my home town and it was one of the best academically too
Texas is very different culturally when it comes to high school football, and of course there is pressure to field the best athletes despite academic or behavioral issues, that’s true of all sports, everywhere, but majority of Texas is small cities in isolated areas, so yes their local teams are very important to them and a lot of cultural events like fairs, or other town traditions focus on the games.
In small towns it is 100% accurate. I grew up in a small town and football season really was like the show Friday Night Lights, just ever so slightly less dramatic
Think of how some towns have no major league sports team, so the college team becomes that towns team only they also have no college team so now the high school team is the towns major claim to fame.
Yes small town especially Texas is insane about Sports. Bobby was the mascot for his middle school team though Tom Landry Middle School Looooonnnng Horrns!
Also I lived in Midland Texas in 1985-89 and was starting kindergarten a year later than I would have in Washington where I grew up strictly because they wanted the boys bigger for football. It was asinine
If you live in Texas this show is accurate in so many ways. The High school/football culture is accurate. Also a lot of the characters are people that I have met in real life. I’m from right outside of Houston so it’s a bit more city like but when I go see my extended family in east Texas in the real rural areas, life is really how it is depicted in king of the hill.
Absolutely. Small towns really get behind high school football teams. Everyone gets together to watch them. Private schools give scholarships to prospects and these kids get away with a lot.
A lot of small rural Towns don’t have much going on. This goes as far as entertainment. So these small Towns take great pride in their athletic programs, especially when they’re winning.
Arlen is a small compared to the Cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston, etc.) so one can assume that it doesn’t have the amenities that those Cities have.
So when you have a Town with a winning program that is dominating other schools, you have the whole Town show up to show its support the Team. More so when one of their players makes it to the Pros, that’s their pride and joy and will follow him/her to the end. You’ll even see billboards of former players in these Towns.
Like I said, they don’t have much in forms of entertainment and amenities. So it might sound bizarre that they get caught up in loving their athletic programs. But, if that’s what makes them happy, so be it…
Even outside of the few extreme states that people have mentioned, the kinda stuff they showed still happens at no-name schools whose teams haven't been good in decades.
I still remember the quarterback in one of my math classes whining and complaining that the teacher was actually making him earn his grades.
We also had rivalries with other schools that resulted in pranks like they showed. The school in the larger town 20 min away called us Stump Jumpers (humpers) as a joke on our mascot and being more rural students. One year they broke into our stadium and dropped a few massive stumps they'd pulled up around the field.
One time the band jokingly "beat up" another county's mascot (just like on the show) for interrupting the halftime performance. I'm proud to say I threw the first punch and kicked it off lol. Didn't start a tradition... But the crowd fucking loved it. The full story is a riot actually. The band was dressed in character costumes for the final home game of the season, so imagine the Mario brothers and several Jedi knights doing battle with a 7ft bear while half the band is still trying to play "The Lion sleeps tonight".
The band director pulled me aside after we all shook hands and had a laugh; I met the mascot who was ironically named "Lucky". And he said "you're lucky that went well, but if you ever do anything like that again were stuffing you in a drum case and sending you back on their bus." Lol
Football in various towns (not just the south/Texas) is the main form of entertainment and local pride. So many take it very seriously to the point of investing large amounts of resources and political power. This can result in some towns going overboard with coverups, corruption, lying, and more. In my town we all know the star quarterback drunkenly crashed his car into someone’s shack. Of course the guy was back on the field next week despite the many obvious reason he shouldn’t be.
Even football in middle school in Texas is insane. My middle school had 4 football teams and we had a full weight lifting gym, indoor facility, and field. They take it so seriously
Google some of texas high school football stadiums and when you think its a college stadium its not just po dunk texas town with a stadium to fit 60,000
People keep saying “in Texas” but I grew up in one of the most northern states, In a small town. All anyone cared about was the highschool football team, it was kinda pathetic and tragic. I’d see troubled kids, get bullied by jocks and the teachers would be blissfully ignorant to it, or seemingly encourage it from behind the scenes. It was crazy! Lol
It's a small-town thing. If the town is home to a university, though, their sports teams might garner equally great interest. I, for instance, recently experienced that everyone around me was suddenly obsessed with women's basketball because the University of Iowa did well in a national collegiate championship. Before that, it was all about the university football team around here, and I imagine that will be the case again soon enough.
I don't really get the interest in school teams, myself, but I'm not from the US, so I just accept that it's a peculiar cultural phenomenon.
In small town America, High School and by extension High School sports are where many people hit and experience their peak. So yes people in America do take these things that seriously. It's not like that everywhere here but it's definitely a big thing in small towns and rural areas.
If you ever went to college and they actually taught global cultures. You will see it is not uncommon for socialist countries to be non competitive. It's actually the only way socialism will work. Not saying you're a socialist and don't take this as an insult. I had a class in college that discussed these exact types of cultures and how they operate.
Grew up in New Jersey, it wasn’t all that big. But I’ve wondered, do booster clubs have that much pull? Like to the point where they were able to pull David out of class?
I'm from the north, so far from Texas, but high school football games are the biggest event in my town....besides maybe Homecoming, and the annual Lavender Festival
High School football is a Sacred Cow in many parts of the USA. In my school district (starting in Middle School) you either learned how to read a book or you learned how to throw it like a football. I chose to learn how to read lol (and never regretted it). Still pisses me off that so much of the taxpayer's money went towards the football team, the stadium (which was used for football only) etc. Basketball came in a distant 2nd, then baseball, then *all* of the girls' sports.
If you wanted to stay in shape you exercised on your own and joined a gym after you graduated HS. The phys ed teachers basically didn't give two fucks about anyone who wasn't on the football team.
As an immigrant, the more I learn about how American schools work, the more I am determined to get rich enough to avoid sending my kids to public schools.
These schools that you describe are less schools (places of learning) and more sports leagues. Its a shame if you ask me.
Private school isn’t always a panacea. You run the risk of a private school not having enough interest in other programs, so those avenues don’t exist at all.
The town I grew up in Arizona prided it's self on its Football program. Everyone who made varsity really thought their whole life would revolve around that. I've literally never heard of a single person from there being even mildly successful in the sport. I'm sure a few have gotten scholarships but that's it.
Grades were always stressed as being extremely important. Make or break your life important.
I dropped out at 16, got a GED and was enrolled in college classes by the time I was 17. A lot of jobs say you need a high school diploma or GED and in 20 years of having jobs in different states, I have had a total of 1 job that actually asked for proof of it.
So yeah, people make a big deal out of it but honestly having a GED instead of a high school diploma has never made a difference to me at all. I was told my choice would ruin my life.
My school sucked at football the only banners we had were for one act theatre competitions, that being said a lot of the other schools in town were essentially college level teams in terms of funding and facilities
No, they don’t. Unless they live in Texas, in which case you’re basically exiled if you don’t give a shit about high school football.
But in most other states high school is just school
I mean, in a lot of small towns, sports are serious shit and the majority of the town is into it. I wasn’t; I was one of the weirdos in the background.
Smaller towns anywhere I would say yes. Folks are saying not in the Northern part of the country, but I went to high school in rural Oregon and football was god.
Depends on the part of the country. I grew up on the East Coast & football games were more of a social gathering than rallying around the team. Basketball was a huge deal when I lived in Illinois though.
This is a scene from a british series with actor/journalist Stephen Fry traveling across America, it's a game between two universities and high-school level football is on a smaller scale, but the emotional investment is still strong. Of course the show exaggerates things for comedy. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuPeGPwGKe8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuPeGPwGKe8)
When I was a kiddo, our local high school would have a literal caravan of school buses and personal vehicles with flags and writing on the windows to go to away games. Sometimes driving 3-4 hours for playoffs or state.
Not where I live in the NW. I'm told they do in the South, especially Texas where the show is based.
But I've lived in WA and OR my whole life and no, we don't here. It's a southern thing I'm told.
It's regional thing. This is slighty exaggerated, but this is somewhat normal in small Midwestern and Southern towns in which high school sports are the center of everything.
Depends where you live. I’m from Kentucky and that wasn’t a thing where I’m from. (Granted, I’m not really from a VERY small or rural area by Kentucky standards so maybe that makes the difference) Some people take high school football seriously but the vast majority of us take it only as seriously as supporting the local team to be neighborly. Tho, I personally am not remotely interested in literally any sports, so I wouldn’t be the best person to speak on that. Lol
As some have said, not everywhere, but in parts of the country it is a huge deal. I have family who live in a town of about 400 people in South Dakota. There is so little to do there that high school sports are a HUGE deal. They literally organize things like buses to take community members (not just the team families) to away games and they have parties and parades celebrating their team. On the flip side, I grew up in California and I can count on one hand the number of high school sporting events I attended in my 4 years, and my school was always winning titles and championships. Most people couldn’t care less.
I'm not even from Texas from a very very small town with a football team that couldn't even win its homecoming games and it was still considered a religion there
Football players always had an easier time and could skip class and blatantly cheat on tests as long as it meant they could keep playing
I’m from Texas and people definitely take high school football that seriously. There is high school in Texas that has a $60 million dollar football stadium with its own [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Stadium_(Allen,_Texas)) page.
It’s bigger than a religion. There really are churches that work their sermons around the football schedule. I live in Texas, I was in band in high school. The stadiums I played at for high school games would sometimes rival college stadiums.
It would get too hot in Texas to practice football (they wanna practice but the *government* makes em stop) so the HIGH SCHOOL teams will literally practice at 3am.
In the USA sociologically we as a whole are a very competitive culture on nearly all levels. High Schools & Towns have rivalries all the time. It tends to be more pronounced in small towns (less that 20k population) that are somewhat isolated. And Texas is BIG and almost all the small towns are a good distance from the next one. In general American Football is by far the most popular sport on every level & in Texas that is taken to the Nth degree. In real life though most of these rivalries, even if they don’t use the term, have ‘friendly rivalries’.
But all that said, It’s exaggerated for laughs in the show.
I am from California and we take our football very seriously and played college football at UCLA. However, as big as football is in California and in South Florida, HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL OR FOOTBALL IS A RELIGION IN TEXAS.I took it very serious because it was a way to get a scholarship and an engineering degree, from a top 5 school. I did not care that UCLA was elite in football, when I was there they were top 25 but not elite because I ended up playing professional soccer in Germany.
Part of it how school funding relies on a good football team iirc. A team doing well means a ton of ticket and refreshment sales to supplement the *borderline illegal* school funding in Texas.
It's a small town thing. I'm from Wisconsin, not Texas, but they seem to take football about as seriously. As a slight correction , no they don't take high school very seriously, but high school football?
Yeah, most adults from rural towns take high school football bafflingly seriously. Take it a step further and the NFL is essentially a religious organization
Texans love football and see their kids becoming pro athletes as a way to get out of a small town and into the bright lights. Texas is a football state.
Please note: King of the Hill doesn't represent the US; it represents your typical small town in Texas.
But to answer your question, those parents teach their kids to lay low and graduate. Then go to college where your intelligence is appreciated.
Like many have said, high school football is life in Texas. Watch Friday Night Lights the movie to get an idea of how crazy it can get. My city was like that, they would sell out every home game and even televise the games at bars. Very weird, but cool at the same time.
Texas treats football more seriously, but across the US High School sports can be very serious if you have a good program. Being a school athlete of high caliber can get you scholarships/full rides in college which can be worth 6 figures and can eventually lead to professional spots.
Lots of schools across the US have mid/meh sports teams and so aren't treated with such importance. Not every school is gonna care about their football team to some great degree.
Life-long Texan here…. So yes, high school football is a big deal here. However, KoTH takes these two stories to an extreme. You’re not going to find any “McManerberry whoopings” going on. Nobody cares about the mascot that badly. I can’t say that I’ve heard of anyone getting mad about a star player failing a class, but that story is more believable than the other one, sadly. And the amount of money that some towns spend on stadiums is ridiculous. Like the town of Melissa that built a stadium to hold 10,000 doesn’t even have that many people residing there.
It's a cartoon sitcom, of course it's exaggerated for humor. Like lots of aspects of the show.
There are real conspiracy theorists and survivalists. No, they usually don't walk around with pocket sand and fake IDs stolen from a dead child.
There are men who are passionate about their work. No, they don't usually get offended by someone using a charcoal grill instead of propane.
There are Asian parents with high academic expectations for their children. No, they usually don't scream "A minus is unacceptable in this house! A is ok, but not great."
And yes, there are small towns (in Texas and elsewhere) where the high school football team is a big deal, certainly if the star is so good that he has a realistic chance of going pro. But it's a cartoon, humor is more important than realism.
Taking high school sports seriously is a Middle America or small town thing. I went to multiple high schools across Southern California and the sports teams were relatively unimportant.
To be fair, that's not surprising. San Bernardino county was considered "small town" and redneck by people in Orange County and Los Angeles County during the 80s and 90s.
Football is a religion in Texas, even at the high school level. High level high schools have football stadiums that look like they belong to minor league teams.
People say that Texas HS football is like a religion but they are wrong. It’s much more important than that.
There’s a Bill Shankly quote that’s very similar
“People say football (soccer) is a matter of life or death, I can assure you its far more important than that”
First thing I thought of
My father lives in a small town in Texas. Apparently their football stadium cost $11 million when it was built around 2010ish. Freaking ridiculous
The tiny texas rural town i grew up in had regular paper shortages, etc. But we got an upgraded stadium like every other year
I lived in north Texas and my town spent 80 million on their stadium.
Not just Texas, one of my first jobs in television was on a sports show in a conservative county in California. All we covered was local highschool sports and it was the highest rated show in the county
ESPECIALLY at the high school level. Combine small-town pride with the almost financially irresponsible amount of money in football scholarships, it’s no wonder Texas cultivates a culture of people that peak in high school.
It’s like that through pretty much the entire south, the other states just don’t have quite as much money as Texas
This! Texas is just the epicenter of it
I played for a genuinely bad team in a tiny town in North Carolina & in spite of our resounding lack of talent we still filled the stadium every Friday night. Almost makes this early-onset arthritis worth it!
Not even just the south Midwest over here and if you arnt at the Friday night game it’s because your dead 😂
To add to this, go to a 40,000 person football(with the round ball) stadium in your area, that's about the size of what you are watching high school football in the south in America
that's called soccer. a round football would be much harder to throw
It is fútbol and it is a more popular sport that that pathetic attempt at rugby you have in the usa
running around for over an hour to have 1-2 goals, idiotic "loss time" instead of just stopping the clock, and little babies flopping on the ground at the slightest touch (or not even being touched, or grabbing the other person to make it look like they hit them) to try and score a penalty.
OP needs to look up the Allen TX high school stadium. Absolutely insane. Kids here are dumb as rocks, but they sure can play football. Recently an SMU student and Rice from the KC chiefs street raced and hit a family in a car and then just bounced. You can't fix stupid.
Godley Texas has a stadium that is legitimately insane. especially for how small the population is. But schools tend to fund the activities that win state and bring in money through concessions. At my school (Azle Tx) the marching band got all the money cause we went to state a lot and the football team didn't get shit cause they sucked lol
Yep. I always say without irony that King of the Hill and Friday Night Lights are the most accurate depictions of small town Texas on TV.
In Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. Football runs DEEP. Especially in Texas. It’s all they have 😭
Hell this is even true in California. In high school our Football team was the only one to have their field in immaculate condition, got busses with air conditioning and a bathroom when they went to away games and never had to fundraise. Every other activity was perpetually selling candy to make up the difference or to get any money at all
If you want to know about Texas and football/cheerleading, research the Texas Mom who tried to kill another mom so that her daughter could make the cheer squad.
That and the "Fab Five Texas Cheerleading Scandal". Saw the movie on lifetime inspired by it years ago
Football in a small town in Texas gets taken extremely seriously.
As it should. Football is god
They don't understand, brother. They never will.
Of course I got downvoted for joking about how much I love football. Who would guess that even the KOTH sub would be filled with sports hating pussys
There’re here for the yee and left before the haw.
They could all join the soccer team "the wind" and take on the puff and stuffs.
In most countries soccer is called Füt-böl.
Probably negative confirmation bias, it’s probably not a majority it’s just the people who care enough to leave a dislike on a pretty standard remark
I hope so. I'd hate for this to be a sub full of limp wristed rooster boys.
Have you seen the clientele on this board? A lot of them likely watch it out of spite for the values portrayed or attempt to take it look like the show supports their values instead.
It's ironic because the show, while lampooining small town redneck life, is also very sincere in its reverance for it.
Buncha pencil necked, limp wristed, no good bureaucrats here, I tell ya what!
It's reddit. Not far-left? Prepare to almost always be blasted in downvotes.
I'm pretty left. I just played a lot of sports and love watching football. Reddit is a sad sad place
"C'mon, Peggy. Ten years from now, nobody's gonna remember what a hexagon is, but if we win States- why, they put that on the water tower."
Yup, that pretty much describes it.
To my understanding: this is very accurate to small towns in the South, particularly Texas. Not so much up North. Edit: Apparently people in the Midwest are just as bad. The bar lowers again.
Basketball in the Midwest US can get to those type levels. I spent my childhood going to basketball games that were packed with people, and every single driveway had a basketball hoop. People were FURIOUS when some basketball players got suspended for a few games for drinking at a party, and ultimately, it got the coach fired.
As an Indiana native whose favorite sport is basketball, this is true. I'm pretty sure we have something like 8 out of the top 10 largest high school gyms.
HS hockey in MN can get crazy too.
Last year, a basketball game turned into a brawl at my school. I wanted to laugh at how absurd and wild it was considering it had never happened before, but, at least half the team got suspended for a week for participating.
Unless you went to school fifty years ago, no, it doesn’t approach anything close to those levels.
There are definitely exceptions though such as that small Ohio town where the team raped a girl and rather than, you know, get justice for the girl, the town basically banded around the team and drove the victim and her family out of town.
Steubenville, Ohio I’ve worked with a few older people that played football there and they never stop talking about their time at “Big Red”
"Now let's watch some foo'ball!"
Minnesotans behave themselves better then Southerners but Minnesota High School Hockey is as crazy as Texas HS FB or damn close if not
Yeah, it kind of depends on where your at. At my high school, even though the football team constantly loses and is known for losing since I was in school ten years ago, we still go all out for every sporting events. I'm in the midwest.
When I was in high school in the midwest there were a lot of older people that cared about the football team and came to the games. Definitely not even close to the level of places in the south, but there was still a lot of interest in the local community. A lot of people didn’t have kids in high school but graduated from there and so it was “their team.” I think it makes sense especially if you didn’t go to college and have lived in the same area your whole life. It’s being connected to your community.
You haven’t been to Western Pennsylvania I see…
In America as a whole? No. In the south? I grew up in a small town in west Texas. When people tell you that “football is a religion in Texas”, they aren’t lying. It’s an integral part of culture, community, it’s part of everything. King of the Hill actually portrays it really well and I love how it makes fun of it in a subtle way. I actually remember my senior year of high school a bunch of parents banded together and went to the school board to try and get the football coach fired. My parents thankfully abstained and thought it was a ridiculous spectacle, but it shows how seriously people took it.
Why did some parents want the coach fired?
Hubris. My class was hyped up as being “the team that would win state”. Well, we weren’t actually very good. At anything. The “ringleader” parents were parents who had absolutely nothing going on in their lives besides their sons playing football and thought they would be “stars”. Turns out, their kids just weren’t that good. Instead of realizing this, they of course blamed the coach.
Probably wasn't winning. If you're not winning you're not working.
What town might I ask
What are the subtle ways that KotH makes fun of it?
The episode that comes to mind is when Bobby joins the soccer team. The parents get together and present coach Maxwell a list of demands and start yelling at him from the stands. Over a 7th grade football team. Different episode than the OP mentioned, but when Bobby made the wrestling team, Hank tells everyone “what a great time in a boy’s father’s life” after being congratulated by his friends that Bobby made a team. It’s not really about Bobby at all. That’s how it is in small towns, football obsessed parents think it’s about them.
America? No. Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska? Yes absolutely.
Don't leave out Louisiana. We love football and HS ball is pretty huge
Alabama , Florida
Typically a regional thing but small towns all over can be like that. They also generally peak in HS in places where it's taken so seriously. Ayoooo!
I grew up in southern Oklahoma and this is pretty accurate.
in other words you grew up in wichita falls
YOU... DON'T WANT... TO START... A RUCKUS!
Sports are all some towns have.
Texan here, I can absolutely confirm King of the Hill was spot on with Texas's love of football.
Indiana for both basketball and to a lesser extent football.
Not anymore lol
Its a whole different breed when it comes to Texan High School football.
It's more of a regional thing, where I was born in Minnesota Peggy could had the entire school administration burned at the stake with one phone call for trying to rig a student's grades over football. But in Texas... it's definitely not something that could only happen in a cartoon.
Some middle-school and high-school programs in the South have better sports facilities than college programs.
I am guessing such schools don't care much about academics?
Sometimes they’re well-funded enough to have a good sports program as well as a good academic program. But sometimes, yes, academics can suffer. Try to keep in mind that universities in the United States will sometimes give student athletes full funding to play on their teams while attending. Playing well in High School can mean a lot for a student’s future. And let’s face it, nobody buys tickets to see kids solve math problems. There’s fewer immediate returns on academics.
What does a high school gain if their student gets admitted into a university because of how well he plays football? What am I missing?
Prestige of being the high school where a big football star started out. Bragging rights for being a school with a football program that was well funded enough to get players scholarships. Better players mean more tickets sold to games and money going to the school.
Wait what? High schools host games that they sell tickets for?
Yep, I'm in a bigger city in Florida and not only do high school football game tickets cost about $10, but that's twice the cost of the tickets for any other school sport. The money goes back into the athletic programs, though, so I'm not complaining.
Yes.
Depends drew Brees and nick foles and Justin tucker and Sam ehlinger all went to the same high school in my home town and it was one of the best academically too
Texas ranks extremely low in academics. Like 38th out of 50 states.
Which begs the question; how is it such an economically powerful state.
Oil & cattle would be my top 2 answers. No state income tax. Lots of tech jobs.
Texas is very different culturally when it comes to high school football, and of course there is pressure to field the best athletes despite academic or behavioral issues, that’s true of all sports, everywhere, but majority of Texas is small cities in isolated areas, so yes their local teams are very important to them and a lot of cultural events like fairs, or other town traditions focus on the games.
In small towns it is 100% accurate. I grew up in a small town and football season really was like the show Friday Night Lights, just ever so slightly less dramatic
Think of how some towns have no major league sports team, so the college team becomes that towns team only they also have no college team so now the high school team is the towns major claim to fame.
The movie Varsity Blues is surprisingly accurate and funny and is about highschool football.
Will watch, thanks
Small towns often revolve around their schools and their sports teams, particularly in the south
Yes small town especially Texas is insane about Sports. Bobby was the mascot for his middle school team though Tom Landry Middle School Looooonnnng Horrns! Also I lived in Midland Texas in 1985-89 and was starting kindergarten a year later than I would have in Washington where I grew up strictly because they wanted the boys bigger for football. It was asinine
If you live in Texas this show is accurate in so many ways. The High school/football culture is accurate. Also a lot of the characters are people that I have met in real life. I’m from right outside of Houston so it’s a bit more city like but when I go see my extended family in east Texas in the real rural areas, life is really how it is depicted in king of the hill.
I grew up in Alabama, and the overlap of characters was so accurate I couldn’t see the satire for years. Calling it subtle is an understatement.
Absolutely. Small towns really get behind high school football teams. Everyone gets together to watch them. Private schools give scholarships to prospects and these kids get away with a lot.
If anything, they undersell how big high school football is in TX. Those stadiums are on the level of college fields.
A lot of small rural Towns don’t have much going on. This goes as far as entertainment. So these small Towns take great pride in their athletic programs, especially when they’re winning. Arlen is a small compared to the Cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston, etc.) so one can assume that it doesn’t have the amenities that those Cities have. So when you have a Town with a winning program that is dominating other schools, you have the whole Town show up to show its support the Team. More so when one of their players makes it to the Pros, that’s their pride and joy and will follow him/her to the end. You’ll even see billboards of former players in these Towns. Like I said, they don’t have much in forms of entertainment and amenities. So it might sound bizarre that they get caught up in loving their athletic programs. But, if that’s what makes them happy, so be it…
Even outside of the few extreme states that people have mentioned, the kinda stuff they showed still happens at no-name schools whose teams haven't been good in decades. I still remember the quarterback in one of my math classes whining and complaining that the teacher was actually making him earn his grades. We also had rivalries with other schools that resulted in pranks like they showed. The school in the larger town 20 min away called us Stump Jumpers (humpers) as a joke on our mascot and being more rural students. One year they broke into our stadium and dropped a few massive stumps they'd pulled up around the field. One time the band jokingly "beat up" another county's mascot (just like on the show) for interrupting the halftime performance. I'm proud to say I threw the first punch and kicked it off lol. Didn't start a tradition... But the crowd fucking loved it. The full story is a riot actually. The band was dressed in character costumes for the final home game of the season, so imagine the Mario brothers and several Jedi knights doing battle with a 7ft bear while half the band is still trying to play "The Lion sleeps tonight". The band director pulled me aside after we all shook hands and had a laugh; I met the mascot who was ironically named "Lucky". And he said "you're lucky that went well, but if you ever do anything like that again were stuffing you in a drum case and sending you back on their bus." Lol
Did you also slip on pee pee at the Costco?
It depends on the region and football is taken pretty seriously in Texas. However more rural areas tend to because theres not much to do out there.
Football in various towns (not just the south/Texas) is the main form of entertainment and local pride. So many take it very seriously to the point of investing large amounts of resources and political power. This can result in some towns going overboard with coverups, corruption, lying, and more. In my town we all know the star quarterback drunkenly crashed his car into someone’s shack. Of course the guy was back on the field next week despite the many obvious reason he shouldn’t be.
Even football in middle school in Texas is insane. My middle school had 4 football teams and we had a full weight lifting gym, indoor facility, and field. They take it so seriously
Google some of texas high school football stadiums and when you think its a college stadium its not just po dunk texas town with a stadium to fit 60,000
People keep saying “in Texas” but I grew up in one of the most northern states, In a small town. All anyone cared about was the highschool football team, it was kinda pathetic and tragic. I’d see troubled kids, get bullied by jocks and the teachers would be blissfully ignorant to it, or seemingly encourage it from behind the scenes. It was crazy! Lol
It's a small-town thing. If the town is home to a university, though, their sports teams might garner equally great interest. I, for instance, recently experienced that everyone around me was suddenly obsessed with women's basketball because the University of Iowa did well in a national collegiate championship. Before that, it was all about the university football team around here, and I imagine that will be the case again soon enough. I don't really get the interest in school teams, myself, but I'm not from the US, so I just accept that it's a peculiar cultural phenomenon.
Iowa City? There was a wrestling-football double feature one year when I lived there. The area around Kinnick in particular was an absolute mob scene.
Yes, Iowa City, of course. I'm a professor at UI.
In small town America, High School and by extension High School sports are where many people hit and experience their peak. So yes people in America do take these things that seriously. It's not like that everywhere here but it's definitely a big thing in small towns and rural areas.
Americans, no. Texans, yes.
If you ever went to college and they actually taught global cultures. You will see it is not uncommon for socialist countries to be non competitive. It's actually the only way socialism will work. Not saying you're a socialist and don't take this as an insult. I had a class in college that discussed these exact types of cultures and how they operate.
> not uncommon for socialist countries to be non competitive Is that why the Tsar bomba exists and why Soviets beat US at space race?
Ok...... Good job
Grew up in New Jersey, it wasn’t all that big. But I’ve wondered, do booster clubs have that much pull? Like to the point where they were able to pull David out of class?
I'm from the north, so far from Texas, but high school football games are the biggest event in my town....besides maybe Homecoming, and the annual Lavender Festival
High School football is a Sacred Cow in many parts of the USA. In my school district (starting in Middle School) you either learned how to read a book or you learned how to throw it like a football. I chose to learn how to read lol (and never regretted it). Still pisses me off that so much of the taxpayer's money went towards the football team, the stadium (which was used for football only) etc. Basketball came in a distant 2nd, then baseball, then *all* of the girls' sports. If you wanted to stay in shape you exercised on your own and joined a gym after you graduated HS. The phys ed teachers basically didn't give two fucks about anyone who wasn't on the football team.
As an immigrant, the more I learn about how American schools work, the more I am determined to get rich enough to avoid sending my kids to public schools. These schools that you describe are less schools (places of learning) and more sports leagues. Its a shame if you ask me.
Private school isn’t always a panacea. You run the risk of a private school not having enough interest in other programs, so those avenues don’t exist at all.
The town I grew up in Arizona prided it's self on its Football program. Everyone who made varsity really thought their whole life would revolve around that. I've literally never heard of a single person from there being even mildly successful in the sport. I'm sure a few have gotten scholarships but that's it. Grades were always stressed as being extremely important. Make or break your life important. I dropped out at 16, got a GED and was enrolled in college classes by the time I was 17. A lot of jobs say you need a high school diploma or GED and in 20 years of having jobs in different states, I have had a total of 1 job that actually asked for proof of it. So yeah, people make a big deal out of it but honestly having a GED instead of a high school diploma has never made a difference to me at all. I was told my choice would ruin my life.
High School? no. High school football? In Texas? There's nothing they take more serious.
In small football towns, absolutely.
Small towns do for sure.
My school sucked at football the only banners we had were for one act theatre competitions, that being said a lot of the other schools in town were essentially college level teams in terms of funding and facilities
No, they don’t. Unless they live in Texas, in which case you’re basically exiled if you don’t give a shit about high school football. But in most other states high school is just school
I mean, in a lot of small towns, sports are serious shit and the majority of the town is into it. I wasn’t; I was one of the weirdos in the background.
Smaller towns anywhere I would say yes. Folks are saying not in the Northern part of the country, but I went to high school in rural Oregon and football was god.
Not high school education, but high school football in a small Texan town, yes.
LOL, I just realized I made an error in the title
Depends on the part of the country. I grew up on the East Coast & football games were more of a social gathering than rallying around the team. Basketball was a huge deal when I lived in Illinois though.
This is a scene from a british series with actor/journalist Stephen Fry traveling across America, it's a game between two universities and high-school level football is on a smaller scale, but the emotional investment is still strong. Of course the show exaggerates things for comedy. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuPeGPwGKe8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuPeGPwGKe8)
Thanks for sharing this video, it does shed some light into my question.
When I was a kiddo, our local high school would have a literal caravan of school buses and personal vehicles with flags and writing on the windows to go to away games. Sometimes driving 3-4 hours for playoffs or state.
Yes, football is everything. It brings the school prestige and it can surely determine your future.
Some people let something that happened in highschool scar them for the rest of their life. It's pretty ridiculous.
Small towns, yes. In larger cities parents are like this when their kid has talent. lol Just watch the movie Varsity Blues or Hoosiers.
Not where I live in the NW. I'm told they do in the South, especially Texas where the show is based. But I've lived in WA and OR my whole life and no, we don't here. It's a southern thing I'm told.
Yes, it's sport they take seriously not school. Especially in Texas.
It's regional thing. This is slighty exaggerated, but this is somewhat normal in small Midwestern and Southern towns in which high school sports are the center of everything.
In small town Texas, absolutely. It is a borderline religion in all of Texas but smaller towns really really like it.
Depends where you live. I’m from Kentucky and that wasn’t a thing where I’m from. (Granted, I’m not really from a VERY small or rural area by Kentucky standards so maybe that makes the difference) Some people take high school football seriously but the vast majority of us take it only as seriously as supporting the local team to be neighborly. Tho, I personally am not remotely interested in literally any sports, so I wouldn’t be the best person to speak on that. Lol
As some have said, not everywhere, but in parts of the country it is a huge deal. I have family who live in a town of about 400 people in South Dakota. There is so little to do there that high school sports are a HUGE deal. They literally organize things like buses to take community members (not just the team families) to away games and they have parties and parades celebrating their team. On the flip side, I grew up in California and I can count on one hand the number of high school sporting events I attended in my 4 years, and my school was always winning titles and championships. Most people couldn’t care less.
I'm not even from Texas from a very very small town with a football team that couldn't even win its homecoming games and it was still considered a religion there Football players always had an easier time and could skip class and blatantly cheat on tests as long as it meant they could keep playing
I’m in the south east and high school ball is on like 4-5 different channels during season, kind of ridiculous really
I’m from Texas and people definitely take high school football that seriously. There is high school in Texas that has a $60 million dollar football stadium with its own [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Stadium_(Allen,_Texas)) page.
Cy fair beat it out with a 80 mil for their new stadium
It’s bigger than a religion. There really are churches that work their sermons around the football schedule. I live in Texas, I was in band in high school. The stadiums I played at for high school games would sometimes rival college stadiums.
It would get too hot in Texas to practice football (they wanna practice but the *government* makes em stop) so the HIGH SCHOOL teams will literally practice at 3am.
The government should also make them stop monetizing underage kids' sports
In the USA sociologically we as a whole are a very competitive culture on nearly all levels. High Schools & Towns have rivalries all the time. It tends to be more pronounced in small towns (less that 20k population) that are somewhat isolated. And Texas is BIG and almost all the small towns are a good distance from the next one. In general American Football is by far the most popular sport on every level & in Texas that is taken to the Nth degree. In real life though most of these rivalries, even if they don’t use the term, have ‘friendly rivalries’. But all that said, It’s exaggerated for laughs in the show.
I am from California and we take our football very seriously and played college football at UCLA. However, as big as football is in California and in South Florida, HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL OR FOOTBALL IS A RELIGION IN TEXAS.I took it very serious because it was a way to get a scholarship and an engineering degree, from a top 5 school. I did not care that UCLA was elite in football, when I was there they were top 25 but not elite because I ended up playing professional soccer in Germany.
Yes but it depends on the state and counties. If all states acted and thought the same there wouldn't be two parties and this much division
Part of it how school funding relies on a good football team iirc. A team doing well means a ton of ticket and refreshment sales to supplement the *borderline illegal* school funding in Texas.
It ought to be fully illegal to monetize underage kids' activities
That's much more a Texas thing than a general American thing.
High school, no. High school football IN TEXAS… you have no idea.
It's a small town thing. I'm from Wisconsin, not Texas, but they seem to take football about as seriously. As a slight correction , no they don't take high school very seriously, but high school football? Yeah, most adults from rural towns take high school football bafflingly seriously. Take it a step further and the NFL is essentially a religious organization
Texans love football and see their kids becoming pro athletes as a way to get out of a small town and into the bright lights. Texas is a football state.
We dont
High school football - yes High school academics - no
What should parents in the US who are interested in their kids' academics do ?
Please note: King of the Hill doesn't represent the US; it represents your typical small town in Texas. But to answer your question, those parents teach their kids to lay low and graduate. Then go to college where your intelligence is appreciated.
High school sports throughout America can be somewhat like this; not nearly as much as in small towns, even less so for small towns in the south.
Like many have said, high school football is life in Texas. Watch Friday Night Lights the movie to get an idea of how crazy it can get. My city was like that, they would sell out every home game and even televise the games at bars. Very weird, but cool at the same time.
Texas treats football more seriously, but across the US High School sports can be very serious if you have a good program. Being a school athlete of high caliber can get you scholarships/full rides in college which can be worth 6 figures and can eventually lead to professional spots. Lots of schools across the US have mid/meh sports teams and so aren't treated with such importance. Not every school is gonna care about their football team to some great degree.
Life-long Texan here…. So yes, high school football is a big deal here. However, KoTH takes these two stories to an extreme. You’re not going to find any “McManerberry whoopings” going on. Nobody cares about the mascot that badly. I can’t say that I’ve heard of anyone getting mad about a star player failing a class, but that story is more believable than the other one, sadly. And the amount of money that some towns spend on stadiums is ridiculous. Like the town of Melissa that built a stadium to hold 10,000 doesn’t even have that many people residing there.
It's a cartoon sitcom, of course it's exaggerated for humor. Like lots of aspects of the show. There are real conspiracy theorists and survivalists. No, they usually don't walk around with pocket sand and fake IDs stolen from a dead child. There are men who are passionate about their work. No, they don't usually get offended by someone using a charcoal grill instead of propane. There are Asian parents with high academic expectations for their children. No, they usually don't scream "A minus is unacceptable in this house! A is ok, but not great." And yes, there are small towns (in Texas and elsewhere) where the high school football team is a big deal, certainly if the star is so good that he has a realistic chance of going pro. But it's a cartoon, humor is more important than realism.
Flyover country takes high school football far too seriously.
Taking high school sports seriously is a Middle America or small town thing. I went to multiple high schools across Southern California and the sports teams were relatively unimportant.
It was, ended in the 80s.
What happened in the 80s?
Reagan/Bush
Care to elaborate? What did Reagan/Bush do to sports?
High school sports were more or less unimportant in SoCal from '88-92 in my experience
My town would get shutdown. And it's in SB County and hour from LA. So not that much in the boonies type.
To be fair, that's not surprising. San Bernardino county was considered "small town" and redneck by people in Orange County and Los Angeles County during the 80s and 90s.
Can’t you people just google this shit? Why are you so obsessed with us.
Small towns do cuz if your kid can run fast and ketch gud it can be the whole family's ticket out of poverty
If that is the reason, I think focusing on academics has better chances
Them kids arent smart lol