69 pages • 2 hours read
Buzz BissingerFriday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Boobie Who?”
The chapter title refers to how quickly coaches write off Boobie after his knee injury. Bissinger explains how sub players wear white while active players wear black. After Boobie’s injury, he is relegated to the sub-group, a major disappointment. While Boobie is desperate to play again, his coaches know it would be unwise to test his healing knee and have already filled his position with newcomer Chris. As a sub, Boobie plays only occasionally, and his performance on the field, while gutsy, is not consistent.
L. V. feels ambivalent about Boobie playing on an injured knee and consistently supports Boobie, trying to keep him motivated despite his depressive episodes around game time. While L. V. hopes that college recruiters will remain interested in extending offers to Boobie, the coaching staff knows that it is only possible if Boobie fully recovers and plays with the same skill as before. Most Permian coaches do not sympathize with the psychological aspect of his injury and healing process and instead consider it selfish that he is depressed about losing his position and the attention. L. V. and Boobie, however, know that to get to the “promised land” of college football, Boobie needs to regain his prominent position on the team.
Another player struggles with depression. Mike is described as a “good kid” by one of his teachers and is known for his friendly rapport with children, close relationship with his grandma, and willingness to work hard. However, he also goes through periods when “a dark cloud descended over him” (222), and he withdraws from interacting with others. Comparing Boobie’s and Mike’s senior years, Bissinger observes that as Boobie goes through his “sad and sour struggle” (224), Mike increasingly shines on the field.
While the Permian Panthers recently enjoyed victories against other small Texan teams such as Abilene, these successes are not as meaningful since they have no particular rivalry with other towns. They do, however, have a hateful relationship with the larger town of Midland, Texas, whose team they would be playing next.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Push for the Playoffs”
Midland is a “sister city” to Odessa, and the Midland Lee Rebels are a key rival of the Permian Panthers. While both are oil industry towns only 15 miles apart, Midland is strait-laced, while Odessa was grittier. During the oil boom of the 1970s, about one in every 40 people in Midland had become millionaires, and Forbes magazine gushed about the town’s old-fashioned Texan appearance. While Odessa became the “Murder Capital” of the US during this time, Midland retained its moneyed reputation, attributed to the fact that Odessa attracted laborers who worked in the oil fields while Midland was populated with corporate oil businesspeople. Townspeople in Odessa consider people in Midland to be conceited and elitist, while they believe their residents are more down-to-earth and fun-loving.
During the 1970s “boom” years, some Odessans suddenly made remarkable amounts of money and used the cash on frivolous pursuits or flaunted it. However, such success stories were comparatively quaint to how the corporate businesspeople in Midland greedily pursued oil money during this time. One Midland resident, Aaron Giebel, made tens of millions of dollars operating an oil business. He recklessly spent it on multi-million dollar homes, failed side businesses, and a private air force. He ultimately lost 55 million dollars and filed for bankruptcy. Giebel’s story was quite common in Midland, as many businessmen became reckless with “euphoria” (235) once they became wealthy and wrongly assumed that oil prices would stay high. The local bank, the First National Bank of Midland, was similarly spend-happy during the oil boom and faced insolvency afterward.
After the bust, both Midland and Odessa were full of sobering reminders of their reliance on oil money; vacant offices, homes for sale, and expensive oil equipment sitting unused became commonplace, as was unemployment. In the football rivalry between Midland and Odessa, Midland’s team, the Rebels—while not historically a great football town—now has a talented team capable of beating the Permian Panthers. The Panthers were somewhat traumatized by a surprise loss to the Rebels the previous year, and they hope for a vengeful win in the next game.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Civil War”
Last year, the Permian Panthers had a one-point loss against Midland’s Lee Rebels. The loss meant that the Panthers could not win the District Championship and guarantee their participation in the playoffs. Many players left the locker room in tears while Coach Gaines retreated to his office, where he sat “in his own world of shame and defeat” (253). Holding the job of Permian Panthers coach in Odessa gives Coach Gaines more visibility and fame than other high-profile people, including the mayor or the police chief. The townspeople have high expectations of the coach’s ability to produce victories. They not only expect the team to go to state but also demand it. This puts an immense amount of pressure on the coach and his family.
The townspeople remain angry because, in their view, Coach Gaines ruined the team’s chances of winning their pivotal game against the Lee rebels. While the coach has some friends and supporters in the community, he is largely vilified, and a petition is circulating calling for him to be fired. Bissinger compares Coach Gaines to the previous Permian coach revered by the townspeople for coaching the team to many victories with such a harsh and impersonal coaching style that players nicknamed him Darth Vader. In contrast, Gaines is the “complete opposite” and has a “wholesome purity” (263-64).
Jerrod is on a hunting trip with his father and brother. Jerrod’s dad is one of many Odessans whose business suffered during the bust. He is currently trying to sell his enormous home. Jerrod feels that with Texan oil running out and other countries outcompeting America in various industries, he does not have a good chance of enjoying professional success as his father did. Jerrod is not interested in academics and commits himself entirely to the Panthers team, which he admits he will feel lost without after graduating.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
The quotes from players, coaches, and townspeople add further nuance and depth to his theme of masculinity in Odessa. One former Midland player recalls how in the 1940s, football was considered a “legitimate cultural and psychological measuring stick” of men’s toughness, complaining that his team at the time had seemed like “sissybritches” compared to the Permian Panthers (248). One element of this enduring macho subculture is the language used by the players and coaches, both in football and life generally. The coach often refers to the players as “fighters,” and player Brian galvanizes his teammates before the Midland game by announcing, “We’re gonna kick the shit out of them…I just wanna fuckin’ maul ‘em…” (250). Jerrod “liked to cultivate an image of fearless toughness” (267). Jerrod reveals that he was frustrated by what he perceived as American weakness against competition from countries such as Japan. He laments that the violence of WWll did not prevent Japan from becoming prosperous and complains, “We bombed Japan in WWll and now they’re kicking our ass…It was stupid to not let MacArthur finish off those rice eaters. Push ‘em back” (265). Despite the violent language and rough physicality encouraged on and off the field, the football players often cry together after losing games, showing that there is also room for vulnerability in their relationships.
These passages also explore the class differences that inform the rivalry between Odessa and its “sister city” of Midland, Texas. While both towns relied on the oil business to thrive economically, even in the boom years, Odessa had a reputation for being gritty and violent, while Midland was known for its growing millionaire demographic and cosmopolitan office buildings that served the oil industry’s corporate sector. Odessa’s embarrassment at frequently being ranked one of America’s worst places to live may have further fueled its anger at Midland, which was praised for its quaint aesthetics. This dichotomy is especially intriguing since Odessa’s middle-class and upper-class people had a thorny relationship with the working class Odessans on the West and South sides of town. Even the affluent Odessans viewed themselves as more working-class and down-to-earth than their rivals and perceived themselves as victims or underdogs compared to the larger, more corporate Midland. He writes that the two towns had experienced tension since the 1940s when “the grunts of the oil business flocked to Odessa to work and service the fields, [and] the majors and colonels and generals came to Midland to control those grunts who worked in the fields” (231).
These chapters revisit the religious-like devotion with which the people of Odessa support the Permian Panthers. In recounting the pressure and harassment heaped on head Coach Gaines after the Panthers loses to Midland Lee, the public’s displeasure is so intense it was as if Gaines had “violated some sacred public trust” (260). Most townspeople blame Gaines for the loss, and a petition circulates calling for him to be fired. Many townspeople write letters to the Odessa American, the local newspaper, to complain about Gaines. One letter calls him “incompetent” (261) and claims that he would cause the team’s decline from greatness. Other townspeople are more threatening, with one denting Gaines’s car by smashing a pumpkin into it and another putting a “For Sale” sign on his lawn. The pressure has a damaging effect. Gaines’s wife Sharon says that people in Odessa “don’t realize they are coaches. They are men, they are not gods. They don’t realize it’s a game…” (254). Indeed, former coach John Wilkins says that to enjoy living in Odessa as a head coach, the team must be successful since losing games would make “the situation […] intolerable for a man and his family” (263). Describing the lengths that Odessans go to in punishing coach Gaines for the team’s loss helps the reader understand how the town’s fanatical devotion to the sport far exceeds general fandom.
