I Watched 40 Football Movies. Here's What I Learned.
Here we are again. I’m writing a new screenplay, and thus another round of my favorite writing ritual: Watching as many movies on the script’s subject as possible in an effort to learn how others have portrayed it and, more importantly, to blow off the opportunity to achieve any actual concrete progress! In this case, I’m now working on a script about football, thus I watched forty football movies.
This time, however, the movie watching was a little closer to actual work than it was the previous two times I’ve been through this exercise. Before, I did this with music movies and romantic comedies, and both of those watch-a-thons dealt with subject matter I could already speak on with varying levels of confidence and authority. I’ve been a music lover all my life, and who doesn’t love a good romantic comedy? Football, on the other hand, is a subject I know very little about.
There was a time in my life when I was a sports fan. That time was largely before puberty, but during that period, I was as dedicated a sports fan as I knew how to be. I wore jerseys to school, I had posters for various DC sports teams on my wall, I bought sports video games, I played soccer and basketball, I knew who the players were and I had opinions on them. Then at some point, I went down a different path. I began to associate sports with certain personality types I found toxic and blah blah blah I went to a liberal arts college. (To be a little more specific on the timeline, the last year I remember being a football fan was the year the Raiders vs. Patriots “Tuck Rule” game happened.) On top of that, everything we’ve learned about the NFL and the NCAA over the past decade or two hasn’t exactly helped.
As a result, I still have a knowledge of the nuts and bolts of football. Generally speaking, I know the rules and I know what the positions are and what they do. What I don’t know is the form. I can’t explain to you why some football strategy works and why some doesn’t. But more importantly, I can’t explain to you why it matters to some that it does. What draws people to football? How do people who consider themselves fans see the game? How do they see themselves, or the players for that matter?
In this regard, I think I learned a lot. Maybe not to the extent that I can speak on football and sound like a well-informed person. But I know much more now than I did before the beginning of this project. So let’s get to the content!
The Movies
Fiction
Any Given Sunday
Remember the Titans
Rudy
Invincible
Friday Night Lights
We Are Marshall
Varsity Blues
The Express
Wildcats
Radio
The Waterboy
The Longest Yard (1974)
Brian’s Song (1971)
Draft Day
Concussion
Little Giants
Paterno
North Dallas Forty
The Replacements
Necessary Roughness
National Champions
School Ties (Note: I’d argue this one’s not actually a football movie in any meaningful way, but I didn’t know that before I watched it.)
Gridiron Gang
Big Fan
Non-Fiction
Undefeated
What Carter Lost
Youngstown Boys
Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez (Note: I did not realize it was a TV show series when I put it on the list.)
The U
The U: Part 2
League of Denial
Run Ricky Run
Year of the Scab
Vick
Al Davis vs. The NFL
Seau
The Band That Wouldn’t Die
The Best That Never Was
Pony Excess
This Was the XFL
Generally speaking, I tried to stick with movies I hadn’t seen before, but this wasn’t always the case. For what it’s worth, I saw Remember the Titans once before in a theater, I saw Varsity Blues during my first or second year living in LA (a movie I deeply hate for reasons we’ll get into later), I saw The Waterboy many times on a VHS we recorded when it aired on USA once, I saw Draft Day soon after it came out as I had read the script and loved it, and I saw The Replacements once in theaters.
Also, for the record, I have seen certain football or football adjacent movies that aren’t in the above list. Mainly Jerry Maguire, The Blind Side, The Last Boyscout, The Program, and a few others. But for the sake of continuity, I’ll stick with what’s on the list. Also, The Blind Side is reprehensible dog shit. Anywho…
Much Depends on the Coach
An obvious point, but one that should be made because I’m going to be speaking in generalities a lot: Football movies are like any other movies in that there are a million components that can make them effective. However, if I had to say that there’s one thing a football movie has to do, it’s give us a compelling coach.
By a “compelling” coach, I’m talking about one of two things. The coach character either needs to be a good coach in the traditional sense or an intentionally flawed coach who either changes over time or gets defeated by the protagonist, more than likely a player. Or if the coach isn’t a major character, they at least have to come off as coach-y, meaning that the people in the costume department need to find some collared t-shirts and some visors and the casting department needs to find some dudes with round tummies and mustaches.
Before we get into examples, let’s define our terms a bit. By “good coach” I’m not necessarily talking about the qualities that make an actual football coach competent at his job. That can certainly be a huge part of the character, and for football fans, it’s probably a much bigger part of the conversation than it is for me. However, winning is only as important as it is in the context of the movie, and I’m talking more about aspects that make a fictional film coach likable in the trappings of a narrative on film. They have to be articulate enough to pull an inspirational speech out of thin air. They have to be able to balance affection and care for their players with a sternness that allows them to drill in discipline and order. If you want to get into the psychological weeds, they have to be someone you can project a certain parental edge onto, or at least you need to be able to buy that someone else would.
Let’s start with the most obvious example who isn’t Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights. I’m speaking, of course, of Coach Herman Boone from Remember the Titans.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the line between a good football movie coach and good casting wasn’t blurry. Hiring Denzel Washington to play a coach of any kind, let alone a football coach, is one the greatest casting decisions in the history of casting, and in the hands of another actor, Coach Boone could’ve made a completely different impression. Luckily for us, however, we don’t have to deal with hypotheticals.
On paper, Coach Boone sounds like a nightmare. He buses everybody out to the middle of nowhere to train, he can be brutal with how he dispenses punishment and discipline for bad behavior (though the racial edge of the “bad” behavior in this particular movie certainly justifies a lot of his actions), and just in general, he can be a grump. (Few things on Earth are better than Denzel playing a grump, but as I said, we’re talking about the character on paper.)
However, he also shows a genuine desire for the betterment of all the players in his purview. He has moments where he’s able to show the level of affection that is clearly missing from a lot of his players’ lives, and he knows when to pump the brakes on being an asshole. There are many fictional football coaches that care only insomuch as they want their players to win games for them. But Coach Boone seems at peace with the prospect of losing if he’s able to guide these kids to the best of his abilities, and as a result, you can understand why his players want to do their best for him. Hell, if Coach Boone guided me through my life, I’d want to impress him as well.
For a different kind of good movie coach, let’s look at someone who seems like they’re the exact opposite of Coach Boone: Coach Klein from The Waterboy.
Whereas Coach Boone is stately and imposing, Coach Klein is anything but. In fact, the brilliance of the conception of the character is that at least on the surface, he doesn’t seem like any coach in any movie who’s in charge of operating a professional institution. Rather, he’s more the kind of coach you’d see in a community league or in a high school where sports aren’t really a priority. Yet here he is in charge of a college program, and due to a humiliating setback in his youth, he has the talent to execute, but not the confidence. He himself is an underdog, and you can’t help but root for him.
On top of that, he clearly cares about his players and he knows talent when he sees it. Once he does get his confidence back, the love for the game comes flowing out of him, and you can’t help but find it infectious. Yet it never comes off as toxic, and he seems to be the perfect balance of competency and just plain ol’ nice. A direction many football movies simply can’t or won’t’ go down. He’s (eventually) good at his job and he’s totally lovable, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that he’s played by Henry Winkler.
If you can’t be a good coach, then you have to be a flawed coach, or an interestingly bad coach. (Or however you want to say it.) By “flawed coach,” I mean a coach who, by design, has some sort of defect in their personality or coaching style that comes at the expense of the team’s wellbeing. Part of the arc of the movie, and the success of the team, will then hinge on whether or not the coach can overcome their issues.
A classic example of this is coach Tony D’Amato from Any Given Sunday, a movie we’ll be talking about in greater detail later. As Any Given Sunday is a rather schizophrenic film, there are a number of flaws we could pin on Tony. He’s an asshole. He’s stuck in his old ways and can’t fathom new ideas. He’s lost confidence in his abilities to read the situation on the field and make the right call. However, most of these issues are symptoms of a larger flaw, which is, simply put, that he can’t communicate. He can’t reach Beaman, he’s dismissive of the new owner (the daughter of his friend, the previous owner), and all the people in his circle begin to break down as time marches forward.
Over the course of the movie, his stance begins to soften. He sees how his actions and his attitude affects everyone around him. By no means is he a completely fixed person in the end (this is not that kind of movie), but he gets it together just enough to lead the team to the fake Super Bowl. They lose that game, but it still feels like a story’s been complete, and D’Amato’s a new man in the end. Or at least he’s someone with a new start.
Another decent example is Coach Sean Porter, The Rock’s character in Gridiron Gang, who’s perhaps the most interesting part of the movie.
Sean works in a juvenile detention center in Los Angeles, and he conceives of the football team as a way to instill discipline and pride into some of the kids who’ve been incarcerated there. At first, the team’s a failure, the players hate one another, and he has no idea how to guide them towards the potential he knows they have.
The issue, as he slowly learns, is him. The kids in this prison are there because they were brought up in an environment that pegged them as criminals from the moment they were born, largely due to their race or socioeconomic background. They were treated like criminals their entire lives, and all Sean does as a coach is continue this trend with constant railing and a “tough love” attitude. Eventually, he realizes that these are just kids, and they need affection and support as much as they need discipline and a grueling workout. Once he has this realization, the team starts doing better and his role as a coach becomes more fulfilling. This arc was completed too early to have any real meaning in the back half of the movie. But at least it’s there.
There are good coaches and intentionally flawed coaches, but there are also just outright bad coaches. What makes a bad movie coach is really what makes any movie character feel insubstantial or boring. They have no inner conflict or issues to address. No personality or flaws. No definable characteristics other than the fact that they’re a coach and generally speaking, they’d prefer to win.
The worst coach character I saw in a movie was Coach Ed Gennero in Necessary Roughness, a true contender for the least funny comedy I’ve ever seen. Ed’s nickname is “Straight Arrow,” and indeed, his one definable characteristic is his strict adherence to the rules at all costs, be it those of the NCAA, the college, or whomever. Of course, he has to break a rule later in the movie, but only because story structure demands it, not because he’s a changed person. Ed, on every conceptual level, is designed to be as boring and by the book as possible, and not in an endearing way. All the love in the world to Héctor Elizondo, but cut him out of the movie and nothing changes that can’t be picked up by Robert Loggia’s Coach Wally Riggendorf. (Hiring Robert Loggia as a coach and doing virtually nothing with him is a war crime.) He has no real arc and no real impact. He’s simply there because irony dictates that a movie about a team that received the NCAA “death penalty” because of various bribery scandals has to have a strait-laced coach.
This kind of irony is considered a core pillars of screenwriting. Necessary Roughness proves the rule doesn’t always work. Of course, one can simply ask why the death penalty scenario was even necessary or effective, and wouldn’t it be more entertaining to have an obnoxiously rule-abiding coach join an infinitely “corrupt” organization. (Corrupt in quotes because what the NCAA considers “corrupt” is questionable at best.) But that’s beyond the ability of this movie to consider, and this is supposed to be the section about good coach characters.
There are plenty more examples I could bring up. Coach Jack Lengyel from We Are Marshall comes to mind. (Sidenote: Ian McShane should play a coach.) But they all fundamentally suffer the same issue in that they don’t do the one thing all coaches are hypothetically supposed to do in real life or in fiction: They don’t inspire. They don’t make you feel anything when you watch them. They are just entities holding clipboards who occasionally bark orders at players.
When Herman Boone walks into a room, you notice. When Coach Klein finds his ability to coach, you care. (And yes, I realize I am praising an Adam Sandler movie, but note that I’m not talking about the part with Adam Sandler.) When Ed Gennero shows up, you simply do not notice.
For A Non-Sports Fan, The Best (And Sometimes Worst) Part is the Camaraderie
If I had to pick a favorite fictional football movie I watched, I’d go with Remember the Titans. Or at least I would say Remember the Titans to your face. In my heart, the actual answer is Big Fan, but I understand that’s not really what people mean when they think “football movie,” and to be perfectly honest, I only put it on the list for pure self-indulgence’s sake. It’s not in any way helpful to my project. I just love Big Fan, and rewatching it seemed like a better idea than rewatching The Blind Side or watching Heaven Can Wait. (I’m sure the latter is fine, but just not helpful to me as it didn’t sound like it had that much football.)
Anyway, my favorite actual football movie is Remember the Titans.
It’s not a perfect film by any means. Structurally it’s a bit clunky and rushed at times, it traffics in the kind of hard sentimentality that doesn’t work on me, and it can be a bit overly simplistic when it comes to its tackling of racial issues. (Though it’s a bit hard to be that bothered by the latter point. It is, after all, a Disney movie from the early 2000s. It would be foolish to expect much in that department.) Also, as someone who grew up about fifteen minutes from the high school Remember the Titans is based on, I identified the filming location as Georgia within two minutes.
Still, it’s my favorite of these movies for one simple reason: It does the most effective job at establishing a sense of genuine camaraderie.
A lot of football movies attempt to establish a rapport among the teammates, and most of them fail for one reason or another. Wildcats and The Replacements, for example, fail because they both attempt to take a sort of Police Academy route where each character is assigned a comedic personality and that’s the only dimension of each we see until X SAD THING happens and the actors have to look sad and not talk for a bit while the coach gives a speech. There’s a demonstration of evolution, but there isn’t any real growth to be found, save for a character or two.
Also here’s one of the dumbest scenes ever filmed.
At worst, many football movie’s attempts to establish a sense of team spirit is actually what stops the story in its tracks. Skeeter from Varsity Blues, for example, makes a date rape joke, and other than a quick comment from protagonist Mox, the movie is essentially fine with this stance, as he goes through the rest of the movie and the epilogue unpunished. Similarly, many of the characters in North Dallas Forty are actively detestable for many similar misogynist and homophobic reasons. (One could argue that North Dallas Forty is attempting to portray football in a negative light, hence pretty much everything that happens in the opening party scene. But I’d argue that it still wants you to sympathize with them, and it’s hard to sympathize with people who will either try to rape or stand by while their teammates try to rape.)
Remember the Titans, on the other hand, is a story about the team helping each other grow as people. Much of the plot revolves around the players interacting with one another, thus the hangout scenes hold more narrative weight than similar scenes in other football movies that exist solely to establish rapport. Some learn to be more accepting. Some learn the extent of their privilege. Some fall further into their racist ways. No matter the case, through interaction, there is change (or a very intentional lack of it), and we learn an incredible amount about each character as a result.
As a non-football fan, I can’t connect through the mutual love of a sport. But I can connect to the idea of young people getting better just by being around one another and being exposed to different ways of life and thinking. The growth on display in Remember the Titans is palpable, and as a result, Remember the Titans is the most genuinely feel-good movie of the bunch.
It’s an easy movie to dismiss if you’re not a sports movie fan. But if you watch Varsity Blues, then watch this, it will look like a masterpiece, provided you have a conscious.
I really do not like Varsity Blues.
Most Football Movies That Want to Be More Introspective Usually Fail Because of Their Third Acts
Friday Night Lights is almost a movie about the psychological terror of the small-town deification of high school athletes. It’s almost a telling story about what happens when you put the weight of the world on the shoulders of a bunch of children, and their complete inability to handle it in the moment or when the people in the town decide that they no longer have any use for them. Instead, in act three, it becomes a fairly rote sports movie where the goal is to win the game. (Later, I watched the documentary What Carter Lost, and discovered that the Panthers are playing against a deeply racist and inaccurate caricature of the Dallas Carter Cowboys. So there’s that too.)
Varsity Blues, based in the same Texas high school football culture as Friday Night Lights, is almost a movie about a younger generation of Texans rebelling against the oppressive values of the older male figureheads. Coach Kilmer stands for cruelty, racism, and any number of old-world values, and the new generation of football players finally have enough and force him off the team. Instead, in act three, it becomes a fairly rote sports movie where the goal is to win the game while playing “My Hero” what feels like several thousand times. One could maybe argue that their winning of said game is really an act of rebellion meant to express that the world has moved forward from the likes of the Coach Kilmers of the world. But that’s a level of intellectual benefit of the doubt I wouldn’t give this movie with a gun pointed at my family.
Any Given Sunday is almost a thorough examination of the underbelly of professional football. The way athletes are used until their bodies are spent, then cast aside. The kind of behavior that’s tolerated within the league by players and management alike. The destructive greed and the toxic work environment and the so on and the so forth. Instead, in act three, it becomes a story about winning the game. It still feels the culmination of everything that came before it, good and bad. But there’s an assertion that all the ills of the league and the game are worth it because, hey, you may win one, and that feels good.
You see the pattern I’m pointing out here.
I’m not trying to say that every football movie that tries to criticize the institution of football or the cultures around it fail. One of the few good things there is to say about North Dallas Forty is that it shows you the extent to which NFL players are treated as disposable, and National Championship is a movie centered around players protesting the many failings of the NCAA. (Spoiler alert: They do not win.) Moreover, despite being an extraordinarily flawed movie, on the whole, Concussion actually does a pretty decent job making the NFL look like villains in their attempts to cover up their knowledge of the brain damage being inflicted upon their players. This is a good thing because like most things the NFL does, what they did was villainous, to put it extremely mildly.
But most of the time, football movies that want to criticize football don’t go as far as they need to in order to be effective because they are made by people who clearly love the game too much and can’t quite follow through on the criticism. As a result, the issues that plague football are frequently mentioned, but rarely are they addressed in any meaningful way beyond the acknowledgment that they exist in the first place. These movies assert that all will and should be forgiven because football, as an institution and a sport, is what’s really important. No matter how much negligence or destruction happens in the wake of these stories, the only thing that matters at the end of the day is getting the big win.
To be fair, football movies are not the only sports movies that fall victim to this particular issue. King Richard is, after all, almost a movie about a man so thoroughly traumatized by the racism he experienced in his younger days that he forces his daughters into a life they never asked for in order to not have them experience what he did. But then it becomes about winning a big game and scoring a sponsorship deal, and the demons lurking under Richard Williams’s psyche are allowed to linger. (In fact, one could argue that this movie actively endorses this kind of behavior. And by “one” I mean me.)
Still, from a story standpoint, it makes the movies weak and undermines what they’re trying to say. And all of this is to say nothing of the moral failings, but more on that later. Also, I realize that these demands seem over-the-top, but we live in a post High Flying Bird world. It can happen.
Shooting Football Scenes Like a Battle is Dumb
Really, I could talk all day about the way football is filmed in general.
Regardless of what you think of football, it can be an incredibly cinematic game. So I found it disappointing that so many directors chose to shoot the football scenes in an unsatisfying and needlessly confusing manner. Some opt to shoot football games like real life matches, with the camera looking down at the action from the sidelines. It makes everything happening clear, but on a cinematic level, I personally find that approach boring. Some go for something a bit more dynamic, but that’s where you frequently run into clarity and aesthetic issues.
(Sidenote: The movies that do the best job shooting the matches aren’t the ones you might expect. I thought The Replacements did a surprisingly good job, as did Little Giants. Fun fact: The latter is shot by Janusz Kaminski, who was fresh off of Schindler’s List. If I just shot one of the bleakest mainstream films ever made, I would also jump at the opportunity to shoot a bright colorful kids movie set in the suburbs.)
Instead of going on too long about why this is the case, however, I’d rather make a quick point here. (Also I don’t know how to describe many of these issues with just words and I don’t have the mental bandwidth to find clips or take stills.) There are a few movies that try this thing where they film football matches as if they were old school sword and sandals battle scenes. There’s lots of shaky cam and extreme close-ups, the editing jumps around all over the place, and the whole thing is designed to feel as chaotic and tense as possible. Also, by “some movies,” I’m talking about a few. But mainly Any Given Sunday and Friday Night Lights.
It’s stupid.
It’s stupid for a number of reasons, but the primary one is that it’s trying way too hard to add mayhem to what’s already a chaotic and frenzied game. It’s simply not necessary and distracting. It’s also dumb and I hate it and fuck you.
Any Given Sunday Should’ve Been the Greatest Sports Movie Ever Made
Speaking of Any Given Sunday…
I want to love Any Given Sunday, but I can’t. I want to hate Any Given Sunday, but I can’t do that either. It’s overly indulgent in the best and worst possible ways, it understands the racial disparities present in professional sports but says the wrong things about them, and every time this movie gives you something to hold on to, it’ll then send five things to push you away again.
Any Given Sunday clearly loves football, but it’s unafraid to be critical of it, sometimes damningly so. (Hats off to this and Varsity Blues for addressing concussions before anyone was really doing it.) On top of this, I’m all aboard the concept, at least on paper, of a cocaine fever dream done as a football movie. Sports movies, let alone football movies, can be monotonous in their presentation and aesthetic (particularly if you watch forty of them in rapid succession) and anyone who makes even the slightest of creative choices that go against the grain can stand out. Even if the hyper manic tone of Any Given Sunday doesn’t always work, at least it tried.
The problem, however, is that it doesn’t always work. And by “doesn’t always” I mean frequently and obviously.
The scene that sticks out to me the most when I think about Any Given Sunday is the filming of his nebulous rap song commercial “My Name Is Willie.” On one hand, as far as satirical rap songs as analogous to a growing toxic ego under capitalism go, “My Name is Willie” ranks pretty highly among the greats. It’s crass, it’s over-the-top, and it might be an ad for a protein shake. (I’ve also had the damn song stuck in my head since I’ve watched it.) However, it also comes at a point in the movie when Willie has only been famous for a few weeks. The idea that in that time, Willie became famous enough to be offered a record deal, then made a song and had all the logistics for it come together for him to record a video, all the while living the life of an in-season professional athlete, is psychotic. And I genuinely can’t tell if it’s in a good way or not.
There is also a darker viewing of this whole episode, mainly that this is a movie written and directed by white men about a black athlete, and part of his descent into egomania involves him making a sexist rap video. Also part of his apparent downward spiral involves him going on a sports talk show to call out racist behavior on the part of the league and his coach. Because, according to the logic of the movie, calling out racism is not being a team player. Of course, one could argue that the rap video is supposed to be broad and he says what he says in the talk show not to sincerely address institutional racism in the league and the team, but simply to fuel his feud with Coach D’Amato. But either way, the racial politics of this movie leave much to be desired.
I point out these scenes because they demonstrate what’s ultimately wrong with Any Given Sunday. Simply put, Oliver Stone can’t get out of his own way when it comes to his writing and his filmmaking, and when you match questionable ideals with questionable filmmaking, you get a mess. A mess that occasionally rises above itself, but a mess nonetheless, and it shouldn’t have been this way.
I still want to like Any Given Sunday. But mostly, I mourn the movie that never was.
Football Can’t Seem to Reckon with Itself (Or: Sports Media is Bad At Examining Football)
Pony Excess is a documentary about the one year “death penalty” sentence the NCAA handed down to Southern Methodist University’s football program in 1987. It was discovered that the team’s boosters were using a slush fund to “bribe” the players, an action frowned upon by the NCAA, and as a result, two seasons were ultimately canceled, a period of pre-existing probation was extended to the end of the decade, and many scholarships were ultimately lost.
If we took the documentary at face value, you’d think that the kids who took the payments were essentially defrauding a charity. Given the tone of the documentary and whose perspectives are being highlighted, it’s easy to conclude that the documentary clearly holds the NCAA in the right, and the athletes did something worthy of having their scholarships canceled and their lives disrupted.
The problem with this, of course, is the fact that college athletes do not get paid to play football for their respective institutions, and while we have to call these payments “bribes” by the letter of the law, it certainly isn’t in the spirit of it. Anyone with any degree of common sense or decency can tell the difference between a bribe and compensation, and the only reason why any of this was a punishable offense was because the NCAA arbitrarily said it was. The logic of why this statuette exists is never questioned by the documentary. There is a brief acknowledgment that a student might want to take this money because they’re from a poorer background and they want to feed themselves and their families with more than the scraps they're given, but the stance Pony Excess essentially takes is that the players and boosters broke rules so, therefore, they’re bad.
This kind of mentality can be found all over sports media, be it in fictional films or documentaries.
The Replacements is a movie based on the 1987 player’s strike. During the real-life dispute, the team from Washington DC replaced all their striking players with scabs, and The Replacements is a retelling of that tale set in the then-modern age. As it’s depicted in the film, the players are striking purely for financial gain. It isn’t about fair compensation, better working conditions, or fairer employment agreements, but instead, the desire the players have to buy bigger houses and more expensive shit. The striking players are the villains, and the heroes were the scabs and the owners.
Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The strike was about the league’s free agency policy, or more specifically, the principle that it’s ridiculous that players could essentially be locked into psychotic forever contracts. On top of that, as detailed in the documentary Year of the Scab, the narrative that this was all about player greed was one created by the owners and the league to discredit the legitimate demands of players. The creative team behind The Replacements fell hook, line, and sinker for the NFL’s smear. One could make the argument that the writers simply took the easiest way forward in creating their villains by making the strikers vain assholes. But that hardly makes it better. Simply change the story to not take a blatantly anti-union stance, provided you want to do that in the first place.
Youngstown Boys is a documentary about Maurice Clarett. Clarett was a running back for the Ohio Buckeyes who frequently clashed with the school, including an incident where he called out the school for not allowing him to attend the funeral of a close friend. All this led to Maurice being arbitrarily suspended from the school for a year in a needlessly punitive manner which eventually led to Maurice’s downward spiral.
The decision by the man behind the suspension, Andy Geiger, is never really challenged by the film. It makes a point about Geiger protecting his reputation, but it fails to acknowledge the greater and obvious point that someone in an academic institution could decide to ruin a black kid’s life just because he or his team fucked up and didn’t allow said kid to attend a funeral and he didn’t like being called out on it.
National Champions loves college football so much that it can’t quite commit to the obvious and more realistic ending in which the NCAA crushes the two leaders of the walkout. (It sort of goes there, but not really.) Various documentaries portend to be about any number of “scandals” involving players when they really should be about the unchallenged authority of the NCAA or the NFL, like The U, The Best That Never Was, and Run Ricky Run. (Note: The Run Ricky Run example isn’t really a fair example, but I’d argue that the doc doesn’t go far enough into the implications of Ricky Williams’s treatment.) Paterno is a film that can’t even muster a definitive stance on whether or not it’s okay to cover-up for a pedophile. All it does is take a vaguely platitudinous message that’s essentially the movie saying, “Hey, it’s complicated, but football!!!”
National Champions is a step in the right direction, and more recent documentaries (mainly Vick) seem more open to the idea of not holding back when it comes to the NFL and the NCAA. But based on what I watched, football, and the sports community in general, seems incapable of confronting itself. It’s not that it doesn’t have the ability to do so. The one-two punch of CTE and the NFL’s political reckoning in the wake of the Kaepernick protests have forever changed the way people feel about the league, and part of that backlash is from people within the community who care.
The problem is that it won’t do so. The fact of the matter is that many (but not all!!!) fans value their emotional connection to professional football more than the well-being of the players. For the owners, as it always is, it’s more about the money. Greed and indifference is a lethal combination, and at the end of the day, I walked away from these movies with the conclusion that football will never change.
To put it bluntly, most of the people whose opinions matter the most, the hardcore NFL fans and the people within the NFL and the NCAA, simply do not care. This realization was the most disheartening part of this whole process.
CTE Looms Over Everything
It wasn’t my favorite of the football movies, but as far as pure charm is concerned, it’s hard to beat Little Giants.
Icebox is one of my favorite characters to appear in any of the movies I watched. Her arc, in which she contemplates giving up playing football because she feels cornered into taking a more traditionally feminine role, is fascinating and effective. On top of that, there’s just something about the suburbs in 90s kids movies. Maybe it’s because that’s when and where I grew up, but there are just certain aspects of them that do it for me. That summer light and the playfulness of the kids just being carefree kids. I don’t know. It just works for me.
I wanted, with all my heart, to enjoy this movie unencumbered. But I couldn’t. I saw this movie after watching the League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis, a thorough documentary on the discovery and attempted cover-up of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the highly dangerous brain condition caused by the repeated head trauma commonly seen in football players. When news of the disorder was breaking, I was only vaguely paying attention. But now that I know more about it, it’s a hard thing to ignore when watching any football media, and as charming as Little Giants is, there was always a loud part of my brain that screamed, “None of these children should be playing this.”
There are many underdogs in the football movies I watched. Rudy from Rudy. The Marshall team from We Are Marshall. Ernie Davis from The Express and Bobby Boucher from The Waterboy and the prisoners from The Longest Yard and Gridiron Gang. I did not root for all these characters, but an underdog’s an underdog. Rudy is one of the most cringe-inducing sports movies you’ll ever see, but despite how saccharine it is, Rudy’s story, on paper at least, is a remarkable one. Similar complaints can be made about We Are Marshall, but it’s hard to root against a community trying to overcome their grief.
I didn’t like many of the movies, but I didn’t actively dislike most of the characters. Yet I couldn’t fully root for any of them. They were all either playing a dangerous sport they shouldn’t be playing or they were encouraging others to do so.
I wanted to find an angle into football. Something I could attach myself to in order to understand why people love it so much. In the end, there were many reasons why I couldn’t. But the leading one of them is simple fact that none of them and nobody should be playing football. There was a headline in an article on Very Smart Brothas that’s always stuck with me: Forget About Colin Kaepernick; I Think I’m Done With the NFL Just Because I Don’t Want to Watch Someone Die.
Shortly after I watched Little Giants, I decided to watch Seau, the documentary about the former NFL player who wound up committing suicide after a CTE induced downwards spiral. Towards the end of the documentary, Fred McRary, a former teammate of Seau’s, looks right into the camera and says, “The headaches that I get (are) pretty much unbearable sometimes, and the thought of dying is almost better than the pain of a headache that I get.” As he says this, he looks genuinely terrified.
It was one of the most chilling moments I’ve experienced in a film for quite some time.
I Still Don’t Know How to Talk About Football Without Being a Gigantic Dick, and I Don’t Know How To Square That with the Reality that Football Comes With Too Much Baggage to Ignore
I don’t like the tone of this article.
I’ve lost my taste for the negative articles, or at least I like to think I have. Moreover, if you’re a football fan and you happened to have stumbled upon this article, or you’re one of the few people who read this site who knows me and loves football, then you probably didn’t like the tone and several other assertions made in this article. I know you’ll have trouble believing me, but I didn’t set out to write something combative.
On one hand, I do feel a responsibility to not make people feel shitty because they like the things they like, particularly to my friends and family members. My desire to see them happy and make them feel loved and not attack them greatly outshines my need to feel right about “dunking” on football, and as long as your hobby isn’t actively harming anyone with its mere existence, please love it with all your heart.
But here’s where it gets complicated: I feel stronger now than I did before I started this project that football is inherently destructive. There is, of course, humanity to be found in the game and maybe even beauty. Many of the players and coaches seem like great people, and many are genuinely inspiring human beings. But between the machinations of the NFL and NCAA, the toxic culture surrounding the game, CTE, the attempts to cover-up CTE, the racism, the violence, and everything else associated with the game, I can’t help but be affected by it.
On the flip side, most of my hobbies have caused their own wake of destruction. A few years ago, the Washington team was rocked by a scandal involving widespread sexual misconduct, but the environment that led to such a moment started with the toppling of Harvey Weinstein, a key figure in the movie industry I’m trying to be a part of. Much of the core pillars of modern music were stolen from black people, TV is guilty of everything film is guilty of, and there’s a decent chance that your most hated Republican politicians stole their rhetoric and tactics from a bunch of hideous dipshit gamers who hate women. Again, it’s not my intention to shame anyone for their hobbies. But if it was, I would have zero business doing so.
There are, however, differences. (Besides the fact that I’m more than happy to be an insufferable prick about the faults of the many compromised industries of which I’m a patron.) Let’s pretend for a second that we live in a world where college athletes were paid fairly and all the issues surrounding the NFL were fixed. That the business of football was well and truly solved. It is still, for all intents and purposes, a game of violence. It is still a competition where athletes are celebrated for the ability to hurt one another. The more that their bodies get destroyed, the louder we as the audience cheer despite the irreversible harm being wrought. We know this to be the case, and yet we still encourage the young to play it. The other industries I mentioned have elements of this, but only in a more metaphorical sense. Junior Seau is actually in the ground, and he will not be the last.
This alone, to me, compromises football. Now remember that the issues I had you pretend don’t exist still do. So no, I don’t know what to say to football fans. Even before the ethics of it, I don’t get football. I probably never will.
And you know what? That’s fine.
This particular script started because of a nightmare I had about my best friend throughout highschool, and someone I basically consider kin. I don’t remember the details of the dream, but it involved my friend, who’s a muscular black man, and football, and I woke up in the morning with a lingering terror that I couldn’t immediately shake off as a dream.
My point is that when it comes to football, I’ve entered the irrational, so to speak. I’m dealing with emotions that I don’t feel like I can really control. But I can dictate how I make others feel about their love for football. Should their love for the game outweigh the very real harm football causes? I don’t know. But I hope the football fans in my life know that I don’t want to hurt them, and I also hope they can meet me halfway and try to understand why I can’t share their love of the game.
A Rundown
Think of this like the superlatives in your high school yearbook, only here it’s a rundown of some quick opinions to end things on a slightly more positive note!
Favorite Fictional Movie: Remember the Titans
For the reasons covered above. But it’s also well made and it’s genuinely fun. Would I have preferred the non-Disney version where Denzel’s allowed to tear into his players with some saltier language? Maybe, but only because I rate Denzel movies by Denzel grumpiness, and he was clearly holding back here. Still, when I said this was the most feel-good movie of the bunch, I meant it.
Actual Favorite Fictional Movie: Big Fan
Criminally underrated.
Would’ve Been My Favorite Fictional Movie If It Weren’t for Oliver Stone: Any Given Sunday
Fuck.
Best Documentary: The U
I feel like I didn’t talk about the documentaries enough.
To be perfectly honest, that’s because most of them were competently executed, but forgettable on any meaningful level beyond that, and it’s hard to write about what you struggle to remember at all.
But there were some exceptions to the rule. Seau was great (though heartbreaking) and Vick does a great job of presenting a nuanced portrait of its subject while also not letting him off the hook for what he did. Still, The U has everything I could ask for in a documentary. It’s thorough, it’s informative, it’s engaging, and it does a fantastic job presenting the culture of the University of Miami and how it spread outward. Save for some aesthetic choices, it’s probably the best movie I watched overall.
Also, the still-good-but-not-as-great sequel, The U: Part 2, has the Greg Olsen rap. The censored TV version is funnier.
Least Favorite Fictional Football Movie: Paterno
YOU HAD ONE JOB! JUST SAY COVERING UP FOR A PEDOPHILE IS BAD! THAT’S ALL YOU HAD TO DO!
Other Contenders For Least Favorite Fictional Football Movie: Necessary Roughness and Varsity Blues
Necessary Roughness is actually a worse movie than Paterno on just about every craft and creative level. But it doesn’t have a moral bar to clear, and its only real crime is being terrible in a fairly low-stakes manner. And as for Varsity Blue, it’s pro-rape. Gen X bros can go fuck themselves.
Why Isn’t Radio in the Running for Least Favorite?
At one point in the movie, Ed Harris gives a speech where he says that it’s best for the community, and for each member in it, to be kind and compassionate to someone with a mental handicap during a meeting that might result in him being fired because he spends too much time taking care of Radio. The movie thus takes the stance that doing the right and empathetic thing is more important than being successful at football.
Of course, the moral high ground is lost pretty much any time Cuba Gooding Jr opens his mouth. But I’d argue that its intentions are actually much more pure and honorable than most sports media in general. Low bar, I know. But still.
“Best” Fictional Player: Bobby Boucher from The Waterboy
There are football movies that attempt to portray the game of football accurately, and there are football movies that put a more comedic or heightened spin on it. (Or there are movies with football in them that were clearly made by people who don’t really know how football works and think linemen just flip their opponents. See: School Ties.) The Waterboy definitely belongs in the latter category, so picking Bobby here is probably cheating.
Still, he seems to average a hyperbolic number of sacks each game, he can apparently throw as well as a quarterback, and he has an unusual amount of athletic prowess for someone in their early 30s. (He writes as a 30-year-old who could not feel less out of shape if he tried.) So as far as fictional football players are concerned, he might as well be Superman.
“Best” Fictional Player That Arguably Isn’t Cheating (And Isn’t Ernie Davis from The Express Because That’s a Biopic and Would Not Be in the Spirit of the Question to Pick): Vontae Mack from Draft Day
Over the course of watching these movies, I think I have a better understanding of how to assess media about football. I did not learn, however, how to be a good football fan. Other than stats and the knowledge of how to interpret them, the latter of which I definitely do not have, I don’t really know how to assess who is the best fictional player I saw. (Or the best real one either, but more on that in a moment.)
Really, the only reason I’m bothering with the best/favorite player talk is because a friend of mine who’s a football fan asked, and I found it helpful and interesting to think about it in terms of the project I’m working on.
So how do I answer this question with the knowledge I have at this moment in time? I think for me, I’m looking for someone who not only has the athletic ability, but clearly has football brain, so to speak. Someone who demonstrates an understanding of the sport well enough to pick up on details that could be the difference between a team winning and not. To me, the player who demonstrates that ability the most is Vontae Mack from Draft Day, as its his insider knowledge and observations on the field that ultimately lead the fictionalized version of the Cleveland Browns to fictional drafting gold.
Character wise, he also seems to be the most respectable athlete I saw. I thought about Willie Beaman, but the entire point of Any Given Sunday is to examine his flaws (as well as everyone else’s), and though he’s a fantastic character in his own right, that’s not really the question here.
I don’t know how to determine if a high school or college athlete is “good enough” for the majors, so to speak. I also don’t know where Vontae being a good athlete ends and Chadwick Boseman being an incredible actor who brings a lot of life to the character begins. But I do know that when I look at the list of movies I watched, Vontae is the one who’s easiest for me to root for.
“Best” Real Football Player in a Doc I Watched: Marcus Dupree, in the world where he was allowed to reach his full potential.
Again, I’m out of my depth here. The actual answer to this question is probably Junior Seau or Mike Vick or any number of players that were interviewed in documentaries. But when I was posed this question, my thoughts immediately went to Marcus Dupree, the subject of the documentary The Best That Never Was.
To give an extremely brief and overly simplistic summary of Marcus as a player, he was an almost comedically fast giant who played running back. He was a highly sought after prospective athlete in college football whose career floundered due to various controversies surrounding the coaching staffs at the schools he attended, people in his circle taking advantage of him, the NCAA, and, as it’s semi-implied in the documentary, some mental health crises. He did eventually join a now defunct professional football league, but was severely injured after two seasons. Many years later, he was signed to the Los Angeles Rams, but was eventually let go.
Marcus Dupree could’ve been the biggest football player in the world, but in my opinion (for what that’s worth in this case, which, again, is very little) he was never put in a position to properly thrive. Of course, all this is hypothetical, and injuries in football are always just around the corner. But I can’t help but feel that at the very least, he would be a household name if he was truly given a chance. Or more simply, if he was treated better by the people in his life.
So why not go with Marcus? It certainly seems like he deserves it.
