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This film relives the season of the 1988 Permian-Odessa Panthers. It also demonstrates the significance that football plays in small town Texas communities. This community for example consists of former Permian-Odessa players that now have had children and have raised them in this community by making them grow through football; with hopes that they will live a successful life someday, but always have the memories of their football years. This film illustrates how intense these communities are about their boys and their team. The first thing I realized about the environmental landscape of this region was that this large desert of prairie, full of Russian thistle and oil rigs, is dotted with these spectacular football stadiums. These people in Texas take their football so seriously that they spend more on the football stadium than they do their school, for they feel that their kids will receive more reward on the football field than in the class room. A great family is formed between these players and coaches; and regardless of the critiques of many of the community, they always have each other, similar too many of the early inhabitants of the Great Plains. Those who ventured west stuck together and shared a common bond in able to survive in the world at the time, just as these young men in the film are forced to survive in their own way.
I saw many signs of racial tensions, such as between the coaches and the officials. Also, I felt that the way the tie breaker coin toss was decided and held in a local town truck-stop that that symbolized the local community social center as we talked about coffee klatches in class. The team had extremely high expectations to fill and even after a key injury of their star tailback, they came together and went further than anyone thought they would. In the end they lose the state championship by several inches, but the community still manages to stay together and accept failure through the hard times and in the next season they win state.