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 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “School Days”
This chapter describes life at Permian High, beginning with the pep rally, which features the school band, the Majorettes, and the cheerleading team, the Pepettes. The educational curriculum at Permian High is intellectually unstimulating and unchallenging. Even the accelerated classes are “hardly a hotbed of intellectual give-and-take,” and many teachers do not devote their entire classes to teaching and instead rely on videos to teach for them. Permian High produces below-average results on test scores and few academically excellent students. The teachers blame different factors, such as parenting, family incomes, and even desegregation, to explain the school’s decline in student performance. While a few Permian High students are gifted academically, they do not have the high social status that the football players enjoy.
The author examines the social reality of Permian High for female students who feel pressured to participate in the cheerleading team and are not encouraged to apply themselves academically. The most popular female students are cheerleaders, while the most respected males are the Panthers football players.
One benefit of being a Panthers player is receiving attention and presents from the Pepettes, though these cheerleaders sometimes push back against the expectation that they behave like a “personal geisha girl” (149), though not with much success.
Brian is a skilled Panthers player and gifted honors student. Because he is very outgoing on the field and very reserved in the classroom, one of his teachers describes him as having a “split personality” (155). Brian understands that his football career will likely end with high school and aspires to attend Harvard, a dream encouraged by his English teacher. Brian’s commitment to academics is unusual at Permian High, where “football was king” (161), and the community as a whole does not value academic excellence. Students such as Boobie, who are behind in their learning, are often written off by teachers and allowed to slack off without consequences. One teacher claims that kids like Boobie only have athletic prowess and cannot be expected to succeed academically.
Chapter 8 Summary: “East Versus West”
In preparation for the upcoming game against a long-standing rival, the Odessa High Broncos, Coach Gaines tries to motivate his team by telling a story about a self-sacrificing Confederate soldier during the Civil War. The story’s theme is friendship and loyalty, and he encourages the team to play like 52 brothers. With the shocking loss to Marshall behind them, the coach and players are desperate for a decisive, morale-boosting win. Their games against the Odessa Bronchos are always tense, as for 23 years, the Bronchos have been unable to defeat the Permian Panthers. This tension is partly fueled by the socioeconomic situation in Odessa, as Permian High is located on the more white and more affluent side of town, while Odessa High consists of predominantly blue-collar white and Mexican families.
After Permian High was established in the late 1950s, much of the town began to cheer for their more successful team. The Hispanic students who increasingly made up a large proportion of the Odessa High student population were scapegoated for their school’s lack of success on the field, as townspeople felt they simply weren’t interested enough in football. Indeed, Odessa High’s reputation as the “Mexican school” was blamed by townspeople for deflating real estate prices in the surrounding neighborhoods and prompting a “white flight” from the west side that further divided the community along racial lines (183). The Permian team remained prominent partly because of the school board’s neighborhood boundaries that funneled more Black players to Permian High. The game between Permian and Odessa is “maniacal” and “relentless” (179). The Panthers win the game handily, much to the chagrin of the Bronchos’ fans.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Friday Night Politics”
Brian’s father, Tony Chavez, grew up in poverty in El Paso and flirted with delinquency as a youth. After a troubled stint in the army, he became a police officer, where he eventually became a sergeant, but was disenchanted with the police subculture and went back to school to become a lawyer. He was immediately hired by a law office as a “token Hispanic” lawyer to improve their image. Tony attracted many Hispanic clients and became wealthy: “the embodiment of the American dream” (193). However, despite his success, Chavez remains wary of the politics of most Odessans, whom he feels display bigotry against groups such as Black people, Hispanics, and the LGBTQ community while revering politicians like Ronald Reagan as a “saint” (193). Tony “wondered if the country had lost its moral center, its sense of benevolence” (193).
Presidential candidate George Bush is going to visit Midland-Odessa. Bush, a Texan, enjoys widespread support in the region, which greets him enthusiastically. In his speech, Bush does not dwell on specific social problems but touches on the typical cornerstones of conservative American politics, such as maintaining prayer in schools, the right to bear arms, and being generally tough on crime.
Texans’ fervent devotion to Bush is “ironic, perhaps even crazy” (203) since his predecessor Reagan had overseen the downturn in oil prices that devastated Texan communities, causing widespread unemployment in oil-rich communities such as Odessa. Even though some oil workers feel the Republican Party does not adequately support them, they continue to vote Republican because it reflects their values. In contrast to white Odessans’ favorable perceptions of Bush, Democratic candidate Dukakis is generally loathed and demonized by the community.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
These chapters repeat various war metaphors used by Permian coaches to describe the Permian Panthers’ success or failure on the field. The coach uses a quotation by H. L. Mencken to motivate the players to start “slitting throats” (165). After a successful game, one of the coaches praises the players, telling them they had “carved ‘em up like a butcher knife” (182). These quotes show how violent language is ingrained in the football subculture and expand the comparison of football players with gladiators by showing how the coaches condition the boys to be aggressive and angry on the field.
Bissinger furthers his socioeconomic analysis of Odessa by examining its educational system and neighborhood demographics. Developing academic excellence is not a priority for most students or even the teachers and school board. The author includes quotes from students and teachers to show that the athletic teams—particularly the Panthers football team—receive more attention and funding than school subjects.
While athletic students enjoy high status at Permian High, good students “stood out in class like a sore thumb” (147) and are generally not popular with their peers. Female students rank below the national girls’ average and lower than their male counterparts on test scores. One clever girl at Permian laments that “it was the end of your social life if you were an intelligent girl” (150). However, the Pepette girls are respected by their peers, and most girls want to participate in the cheerleading team since “it’s the closest they can get to being a football player” (150). The fact that these Pepettes are casually referred to as “geisha girls” (149) and play a subservient role to the football players does not detract from the allure of the position. One female student says that she “knew girls who privately were quite intelligent and articulate, but were afraid to show it publicly because of the effect it would have had on their social lives” (150). Bissinger’s thorough research into the typical student experience reinforces the impression that football is an essential aspect of the school culture and a deciding factor in student life.
Building on the academic profile, Bissinger reveals that many Permian teachers feel the students are not capable of engaging with the curriculum in a meaningful way. Many classes are simply not challenging. Some include “165 fill-in-the-blanks on the uses of a microwave” (154), while others use a movie version of a novel instead of reading it (142). Bissinger proves that the school board values athletics above education by detailing their expense reports. While they spend tens of thousands of dollars on medical supplies and chartered jets for the Permian Panthers’ games, they allocate only a fraction of that amount to English materials. The veteran English teacher, LaRue Moore, is paid significantly less than the head football coach and does not receive perks like a free work vehicle. These details demonstrate how the school board greatly influences how students and teachers experience Permian High.
Changing demographics in Odessa increase the tension and competition between East and West Odessa’s rival football teams. While East Odessa is more affluent and has the highest proportion of white residents, West Odessa is home to working-class whites and blue-collar Odessans of Mexican heritage. Thus, it is no coincidence that most Odessans cheer for the Permian Panthers while only a handful of fans from the West side supports the Odessa High Bronchos. The “white flight” from West Odessa to East Odessa results in the Permian Panthers being a primarily white, middle-class team, while Odessa High’s team reflects their school’s Hispanic and working-class demographic. These demographic trends are tied to the town’s history of racist laws and claims that many white locals fear the Hispanic population’s growing influence. While much of the town loved supporting the Permian Panthers because of their team’s continued success, Bissinger argues that the team also represents the townspeople’s bias toward the white middle class. The interview with Vickie further illustrates the anti-Hispanic bias. Vickie, the only person of color to serve on the school board, says that she was racially abused by other locals due to her Mexican background (185).
