'Friday Night Lights' does good job of character assasination on D3 football

[Ron Boerger]

The penultimate episode of 'Friday Night Lights' aired tonight.  This is a program that has gone to great lengths over the years to accurately portray high school football in Texas, among other things.  In tonight's episode, one of the East Dillon star players has a chat with a couple of coaches from a fictional "D3" school.  And for all the things they got right over the years about football in Texas, the writers of this episode apparently made a deliberate decision to reinforce the misconceptions many have about Division III football.  To wit:

- The two coaches are slovenly, unshaven, and shown having scarfed down a great deal of banana pudding.
- They talk about their 'eight game' schedule, 'mostly in Arkansas, but every other year we get a trip to Oklahoma.' 
- Luke is asked if he likes to fish, at which point the coaches invite him to come up and go fishing on their '18-foot boat.'
- One of the selling points for the school (in a small town) is a new movie theater built somewhere in town. 
- The coaches leave a very amateur binder that I guess is supposed to tell Luke more about the school.

Later in the episode, Luke is talking about his future and says that he's not feeling the love to continue playing ball at this bush-league college. 

Whoever wrote this episode must have a real hate-on for D3; this kind of mischaracterization had to be deliberate given how well they have treated most everything else in the series.  To say I am incredibly disappointed at this inaccurate portrayal is an understatement.   With the series being filmed in Austin, they could have gone 60 miles up the road to UMHB or 80 miles down the road to Trinity or Texas Lutheran to get the true story if they'd wanted to tell it. 

[Mr. Ypsi]

Ron, I share your disgust.  I was going to say they could also just walk over to Austin College; then checked and discovered that Austin College is farther from Austin TX than most (if not all) NE regon D3 colleges are from Boston!  I (naively) assumed Austin College was in Austin.

[It may be apocryphal, but supposedly a bus driver took a Wabash College opposing team to Wabash, IN - over 100 miles from Wabash College (in Crawfordsville).]

[Ron Boerger]

The one thing they definitely did NOT get right, other than D3 portrayal, would be two schools combining forces to have a single football team.  Not only would the University Interscholastic League forbid such an arrangement, but (especially in rural Texas) a whole lot of other things would get chopped before any school (or school district) would sacrifice a football team. 

It's artistic license (etc). to advance the plot and help Coach Taylor leave Texas high school football behind so Tami can pursue her dream job.  There's been a lot of that this season as they try to wrap up about a billion story lines.

[Gray Fox]

I've never seen the show, but I was tempted to watch the other night.  I'm glad I didn't.

[K-Mack]

Ditto. Until this I'd heard only good things though.

I've never seen the show, but I was tempted to watch the other night.  I'm glad I didn't.

[Ron Boerger]

It's been an awesome series.  Even my wife, the non-sports fan, has enjoyed it because football is only a small part of the story.  They unfortunately have painted some things with a very broad brush this season, since it's the last, and D3 was one of them. 

The last ep is on the DVR waiting for us to watch it (I've been out of town as my mom is having some pretty serious health issues), and we will. 

True story - the season 1-3 Dillon Panther unis?   These were actually Pflugerville (yes, real town of around 20K now) Panther uniforms, and we lived within an easy walk of the stadium.  We got to hear the band and the crowd every week there was a home game.  Early FNL used the P'ville stadium, then they moved on.   

[etbu27]

I agree, Fantastic show and series...but they did a pretty good job of setting D3 back a few years for its viewers with the sucker punches. Oh well, misconceptions are life I suppose. Texans dont all wear boots and tackle cows, and D3 isnt bush league crappy, last choice football.

[frank uible]

It is perllous for one to accept any information from Hollywood purporting to be a fundamental truth.