Clear eyes, fu-cking hell.
In the words of the great man, Coach Eric Taylor, "can I talk to yew about suh-min'?" As fans of Friday Night Lights, i.e. the sane amongst us, will be all too aware, high school football is a big goddamn deal in Texas.
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If you grew up in Ireland, remember when your teacher would wheel in the tv and video player only for the dearth of God-forsaken remote controls in your school to put pay to your chances of watching some insanely-bad-but-better-than-schoolwork video? Well, voters in McKinney, Texas have literally just given the go-ahead to build a 63 million dollar high school football stadium in their locality, after months of contentious debate in the suburban city north of Dallas.
But it doesn't stop there. According to the New York Times, the 12,000-seat facility and an attached events center would be just the latest in an ever-expanding list of super-sized high school stadiums in the state of Texas.
The aforementioned McKinney project, for example, has frequently been compared to the $60 million high school stadium in nearby Allen, also north of Dallas (and obviously a flagrant copy of Dillon, by all accounts). With seats for 18,000 people, Allen's high school stadium has nearly the same capacity as Madison Square Garden. Another school stadium under construction in Katy, outside Houston, will also have 12,000 seats at a projected cost of more than $62 million.
Down south, football is a really big deal, and playoff football is a really big deal,
said Jennifer Gray, the chairwoman of a pro-stadium group. No shit.
Fans in McKinney acknowledge that the old stadium - the 7,000-seat Ron Poe Stadium built in 1962 - provides more than enough room to accommodate supporters of the three schools who play there, although the car park is apparently too small.
However, the population of McKinney is growing at a rate that has led officials to believe the number of high schools in the area could triple in the coming decades - presumably in large due to the number of teenagers who partake in incredibly adult relationships from as early as freshman year, but in reality are played by actors in their thirties. Wait... What?
Texas forever.
