Only In Texas

I like football.

I like football a lot.

I played through high school.

I'm a big college football fan. (I was a lot bigger fan pre-BCS.)

I'm a big pro football fan. (I was a lot bigger fan pre-Jerry Jones.)

But the following two stories are over the top, even for Texas, where football is more of a religion than a sport.

I received the following email this morning. This is not a joke or a spoof. It's a real email for a real 3-4 year old football league.

-----Original Message-----

From:
Sent: Sun 2/6/2011 11:33 PM
To:
Subject: city wide 3-4 year old football league registration

The city wide 3-4 year old league is currently registering for the upcoming season. 

The season starts in March. If you know of anyone that may be interested in registering, please forward this information. 

Registration will be held at ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­________ on Saturday from 2pm-3pm and on Sunday from 3-4pm.

Shouldn't they be weaned first?

Next, we have an article from no less an esteemed media outlet than the New York Times (for once, I find myself somewhat in agreement with that bastion of the left).

A $60 Million Palace for Texas High School Football

From his office window, Steve Williams surveyed the chaos of construction. His view consisted of rocks and dirt beneath bulldozers and cranes, but where others might see excess, he saw something brazen, bold and gloriously Texan.

The $60 million football stadium at Allen High School, where Williams is the district athletic director, was starting to take shape.

$60 million dollars for a football stadium - at a time when the state is undergoing massive budget cuts. The mind boggles.

This is no ordinary stadium, in no ordinary state, where football ranks near faith and family. Super Bowl XLV will take place a short drive southwest next Sunday at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, but while the “big game” will repeatedly highlight football’s oversize importance in Texas, the folks in Allen need no reminders. Here, every game is big.

Williams — Bubba to his friends — arrived long before the boom, when Allen was more speck than sprawl, and now he cannot fathom all the fuss over this stadium, the calls from England, the Pacific Northwest, New York.

Bubba ... need I say more?

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Williams said Friday. “We got a lot more interest than we thought we would.”

Candidate for Understatement of the Year.

On football Friday nights ... cars park for miles down the street, where the aroma of barbecue is the local perfume. The scene is straight from “Friday Night Lights,” the overcrowded version.

“It’s controlled chaos,” said Anthony Gibson, the school’s fine arts director. “There’s an energy you can’t describe. When they say football is like religion in Texas, it’s true. From little kids all the way to the Super Bowl, we do football right.”

Too bad we don't do education right.

This big town started small, with one street, Main Street, and an annual parade that marched up, turned around and marched back. Bob Curtis, who recently retired as the district’s facilities director, was born in Allen, lived here all his life. As a teenager, he delivered groceries, and the customers left their doors unlocked and money on the kitchen counter. He stocked the cupboards and left change.

When Curtis played football in the early 1960s, Allen’s population hovered around 650, 18 of whom were in his high school graduating class. Williams arrived soon after and found a small community that farmed cotton and was centered on the high school.

These days, Allen is a relatively affluent suburb north of Dallas, with a professional hockey team (the Americans of the Central Hockey League), a church seemingly on every corner, several strip malls and rows and rows of brick houses, which line the subdivisions that dominate the landscape.

The high school, which more closely resembles a small college, remains the centerpiece. Its athletic center contains the football team’s offices, an indoor practice field, a weight room, a film room and separate locker rooms for football, soccer, basketball and track.

(The current stadium has) artificial turf and portable bleachers that bring its capacity to 14,200...

But that's not good enough. They need new turf and more seating - $60M worth of new turf and seating....

Parking and season tickets rank as the current stadium’s biggest challenges. The builders could have never anticipated Allen’s growth, the 8,000 fans who travel to away games, the 3,000 students who participate in home games, in football, in band, as spectators.

Some families have held season tickets for 25 or 30 years. Their children graduated, moved, had their own children, but the families kept the tickets for the town’s marquee Friday night events. New residents scramble for season tickets. Before this season, roughly 400 families entered a lottery for 70 available seats.

Even parents of band members complain about the seating. About 100 of them are volunteers, in part because they receive sideline access for games. And the team, the band, the spectators continue to grow. Band members alone consume 2,000 bottles of water every game. Imagine the bathroom lines that result.

Williams believes the new stadium will solve those issues. It will hold 18,000 spectators in a sunken bowl designed to improve sightlines. The stadium will include a two-tier press box, an indoor golf practice area, a high-definition video scoreboard, a practice room for wrestling, and enough parking for every car in Dallas, or close.

An indoor golf practice area?!?!? A hi-def video scoreboard?!?!? For a high school?!?!? Jesus H. Christ, I'm glad I'm not paying property taxes in that district.

“Look, football has always been a big deal here,” Williams said. “This is Texas. But this bond project is about much more than football. It’s about our school, our community.”

“It’s about tra-di-tion,” he added, accentuating the syllables.

To some, however, the stadium project will always embody excess simply because of its size and cost. In fact, with significant education cuts looming across the state, Allen anticipates an increasingly negative reaction as the stadium nears completion, with its first game scheduled for August 2012.

Most here are Cowboys fans who plan to participate in the Super Bowl festivities, if only because this is football, and this is Texas. Their monument to their favorite sport is a smaller version of the Jerry Jones-built palace that will host the Super Bowl next Sunday between Pittsburgh and Green Bay.

We all know how well that turned out.

Up the road, in a state known for and defined by size, Allen is building perhaps the most impressive high school stadium. But it will not be the state’s biggest. At least four high school stadiums are larger.

Which makes perfect sense, at least in Texas.

It's all about priorities. God forbid we should spend $60M on libraries, classrooms, or teachers. That would be a waste of money...