FNL is a fantastic book. It absolutely captured the desperation, and hope, found in an oil-busted Texas town in the late 80s.
I was in high school at the time, exact same age as many of the key players in that book. Even though Austin isn't as small-town as Odessa, it had a much smaller-town feel than huge cities like Dallas and Houston at the time, and I could definitely relate.
I liked the TV series okay, but it wasn't much like the book. The movie with Billy Bob Thornton, on the other hand, was.
The show, along with the 1999 FNL-inspired
Varsity Blues was shot in and around Austin, specifically Coupland and Elgin for
Varsity Blues.
I was a kid living in Texas when
Varsity Blues released. I took it for granted then, but when watching
Varsity Blues two decades later, I’m always impressed by how many details are accurate to my 90s experience of Texas High School Football:
-Parents waiting an additional year to enroll their boys in kindergarten so their builds were more matured and filled out for football once high school rolled around
-Friday Football pep rallies held in the gyms for the entire school to attend instead of classes.
-Long lines of school busses and vehicle traffic caravanning together to other towns for road games
-Extensive local newspaper coverage of the high school football season topped by front page stories of standout players or high profile matchups, not only in smaller town papers but front page coverage for markets as large at Tyler (100k?) and Corpus Christi (300k?)
-Signs of the players posted in their yards. On my street several of our neighbors were home to varsity players. To kick off the season the cheerleading squad stopped by in their uniforms to post signs of specifically numbered jerseys in their front yards.
-Season football highlights sold in VHS tapes at the local video rental store – I don’t remember this detail being the case; however, for Friday game nights, the local news added an additional half hour at the end of their 10 o’clock news to parade highlights and live updates from area wide football games.