Friday Nights Under Lights

and Saturdays Under Sun

A small-town American football story — told for everyone who lived one, and translated for everyone who didn't.

You already know this story. Maybe not the details, but the feeling. If you ever pulled on a helmet in a small American town on a Friday night in the 1970s, your version is just as true as this one. So is your father's from the '40s, your brother's from the '60s and your son's from the '90s."

The setting could be anywhere. A region of small towns — none large enough to support their own high school. The kind of place where a regional school gets built because it's the efficient solution to a resource scarcity problem. One school, serving five or six towns, drawing kids from farms and villages spread across miles of back roads. Everybody knows everybody. Your father went there. Your mother went there. Aunts. Uncles. Your brothers, sisters and cousins too. The building holds the whole community's memory in its walls.

You show up freshman year weighing maybe 155 pounds, and the varsity players look like grown men. But by sophomore year, you've put in the work. You make the varsity squad as a starter. In a small school, this is less about being exceptional and more about the math — there aren't enough bodies to keep anyone on the bench who can contribute. You play because they need you. And once you're out there, you learn fast or you get hurt.

By senior year, you're voted co-captain. That means something different in a small town than it does on paper. It means the other guys — the ones you've been hitting and getting hit alongside for three years — trust you. Not your talent. Your reliability. You'll be where you're supposed to be when it matters. That's the whole job. The shoes are big.

And that year, your team goes undefeated in the conference.

The Coach Who Thought Differently

Credit belongs to the head coach.

Every other team in the conference ran the same offense — whatever the pros were running on Sunday. An understandable decision. Kids want to play what they see on television. Coaches want to teach what they know. But here's what nobody noticed: when every team runs the same system, every team is also practicing all season to *defend* that system. The whole conference becomes a closed loop. The same formations. The same tendencies. The same answers to the same questions.

It all becomes noise.

The coach saw it. He installed the Wing-T — a formation that had been popular a generation earlier. An offense built entirely on misdirection, deception, and disciplined execution. Multiple fakes on every play. Linemen pulling across the formation. The ball hidden behind a choreography of moving bodies. Beautiful, old-fashioned football that nobody in the conference had seen or prepared for.

The first half of the season was almost unfair. Teams were so confused by what they were seeing that we won before the third quarter. Word spread. Film got passed around. By mid-season, future opponents were scheming.

But by then it was too late.

We had half a season of live reps. While they were just beginning to figure out how to *defend* the Wing-T, we had already climbed past the steep part of the learning curve in *running* it. The timing was in our hands. The fakes were automatic. The pulls hit like they were supposed to. We had accelerated beyond the point where a good defensive game plan could catch us.

They were solving last week's problem. We'd already moved past it.

Iron Man Football

Here's something that doesn't exist anymore, and maybe shouldn't, but it shaped everyone who lived through it.

I played roughly 90% of every snap for three years. Both ways. Offense and defense. Plus special teams.

In the big schools, they had separate squads — one group for offense, a completely different group for defense. Fresh legs rotating in. Our roster was maybe 28 kids. You played, or the team didn't have enough to field a side. There was no "rest." There was halftime, and there were timeouts, and that was it.

Special teams too. I was the snapper — the one who starts the play on punts and field goals by firing the ball between his legs to a teammate seven yards behind him. Do it right and nobody notices. Do it wrong and it's the only thing anyone remembers. On kickoffs, I lined up on the outside. My job was containment. Hold the edge. Don't let anyone get outside you. You're the fence post. If you break, the whole corral opens.

In the Trenches

On offense, I played Center and Guard. The anonymous positions. The guys in the trenches who never get their names in the paper but without whom absolutely nothing happens. No run breaks free without a block. No pass gets thrown without protection. You do your job, and somebody else gets the glory. That's the deal.

The Wing-T made it better than that, though. It made linemen into athletes. Cross-blocking — where two linemen swap assignments and each takes the other's man. And pulling — where you leave your spot at the snap, turn, and sprint behind your own line to deliver a block at the point of attack twenty feet from where you started. You're 175-plus pounds moving at full speed, arriving at exactly the right place at exactly the right moment to flatten a defender who never saw you coming.

I was good at pulling. The coaches figured this out and started swapping me between Center and Guard depending on the play call. The defense never knew which gap I'd be pulling from. One more layer of misdirection built into a system already designed to confuse.

When they say I maximized my "impact," they mean it literally.

The Edge

Defense was where I felt most alive. Defensive end. Outside linebacker. Always on the edge of the formation. Always responsible for containment.

I had three jobs, and none of them showed up in the stat sheet.

Job one: Attack. Fire off the snap into the blocker assigned to me — offensive lineman, tight end, fullback, whoever — and take him on before he can set up. Plug the hole. Fill the lane. Force the ball carrier to redirect, to bounce outside or cut back, to abandon the play's design. In this mode, I almost never made the tackle. But I made the tackle *happen*. I turned a designed play into a broken play, and my teammates cleaned it up.

Job two: Contain. Position myself so the ball carrier's only option is to run sideways. Lateral. Parallel to the line. Every step sideways is a step that gains no yardage — but it burns time. And while the runner is going nowhere, the rest of the defense is closing in at full speed. I wasn't trying to make a play. I was compressing time and space until the play made itself.

Job three: Rush the passer. Or pursue from behind on plays going away from me. Chase. Sprint across the field to the other side, because you never know — the play might be a reverse, or a double reverse, a designed misdirection where the ball suddenly comes back your way. If you got lazy and stopped pursuing, if you assumed the play was over on your side, that's exactly when the reverse breaks for a touchdown.

The discipline was in resisting what your eyes told you. Trusting the system over your instincts.

What It Was Really About

Here's what my international colleagues should understand about American high school football in a small town in the 1970s.

It wasn't about the sport. Not really.

It was about Friday nights when the fans from the region and the next showed up because they loved the game or the experience. It was the band playing fight songs that your parents heard when they sat in the same bleachers twenty-five years earlier. It was the bus rides through dark hills on the way to away games, thirty teenagers in pads and helmets watching their breath fog the windows. And the small group of parents who could follow. It was the day before Thanksgiving, when your rival arrived and the stands were packed with people who'd been coming to that game since before you were born.

It was about learning — before you had words for it — that your job isn't always to be the one who finishes the play. Sometimes your job is to make the play possible for someone else. To absorb the hit. To hold your ground. To do the thing that nobody sees so that the thing everyone cheers for can happen.

I didn't make tackles. I made them happen.

Forty-seven years later, that's still the only job description that matters.

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Tomorrow, a hundred million Americans will watch the Super Bowl. If you're watching with them for the first time, now you know what the game meant to at least one kid who played it — and to a generation of kids just like him, in small towns just like his, on Friday nights they never forgot.