The state of Texas is incredibly unique and it’s also incredibly large, making it tough for many to get to more remote parts of the state. Texas high school football [TXHSFB] reflects our uniqueness, and the many traditions and pageantry reflect how special each town in our state is. We decided to make things easy for you and give you this true TXHSFB Bucket List, featuring 10 of our favorites from around the state.

Eat at a Small Town Concession Stand

Every concession stand has the standard hot dogs, nachos and popcorn, but catch a game in a small town and often times the food options get much more diverse. If you want a cheeseburger, there’s a good chance the band boosters are grilling up burgers to raise money for the next band contest. There’s a strong possibility there’s someone grilling up turkey legs and/or hot links on the BBQ pit, and if you are lucky you might get your hands on a brisket sandwhich. If you are in South Texas, you could possibly find yourself munching on some fajita tacos (Sinton’s are famous!) and in some tiny towns in West Texas like Guthrie, the concession stand is the only dining establishment in the county, so you know the food there is good!

Saturday Night Lights in D’Hanis

One would think in tiny D’Hanis (50 miles west of San Antonio, population 548) the Friday Night Lights are a big deal, but in fact they aren’t a big deal and for the most part they don’t exist here. Preposterous, you say? No, it’s true. That’s because in D’Hanis they have Saturday Night Lights. The Cowboys play the vast majority of their home games on Saturday nights. The tradition goes back to 1962 when the Cowboys started playing football, and according to the locals it started so their fans could drive eight miles to the east and watch neighboring Hondo (population 9,000) play.

"We do all of our grocery shopping there, we basically go there all the time so we know a lot of people there. Pretty much everyone has a relative there, so we get to watch our friends and family on Friday's and they come watch us Saturday. There's not much else to do out here if you aren't going to San Antonio, so why not have the game on a different day,” replied one local.

If you catch a game at Wools Stadium on Saturday night, there’s plenty of Hondo Owls gear mingled in with the purple on the home side. Head coach Troy Langfeld has been at D’Hanis since 1995 and took over as head coach in 2006 and he admits at first it took some getting used to, but he’s adjusted well.

"It's one of those deals that's been going on long before I got here, about four years ago they put a vote up in town to see if we should go to playing on Friday night. The community voted 95 percent to keep the games on Saturday. I think most are just used to it now. For the school it's great because it literally doubles our gate. In fact if anyone tried to change it they’d probably get run out of town! D'Hanis folks will always come, but we get people from Hondo, Medina, Sabinal, Medina Valley all coming over just to watch a game. I think deep down it gives us a bit of competitive advantage as well. It's a different routine playing a game on a non-school day. Some teams have trouble prepping for that, for us it's normal. For others it's not, I can always tell when a new coach comes in or a team is new on their schedule because they always call us thinking there's a misprint on the schedule when our game is on Saturday. We just tell them, 'No we play on Saturday.'"

So if you want to take a lovely Saturday evening drive, head down to D’Hanis and watch some 2A football and witness one of the state’s most unique traditions.

Catch a Game in Canadian

Our state is full of beautiful scenery and one of the real hidden gems as far as a town and a stadium is in Canadian up in the panhandle. Get to town early and check out a unique and beautiful community known as “The Oasis of the High Plains” as Canadian is nestled along the rolling hills along the Canadian River and it’s got some beautiful sights to view, along with an incredible collection of art in their beautifully restored downtown area. Oh, and the football is pretty special as well, as Chris Koetting’s Wildcats are almost always a state title contender and Wildcat Stadium is one of the best football scenes in the state.

Blue Front + White Back = Magic

It’s always an electric atmosphere at Wildcat Stadium, tucked just east of I-35 in Temple right in the heart of Central Texas. The usually tough Wildcats have a set of pants that might confuse you at first if you’ve never seen them before: the “Blue Front, White Back” pants. Legend has it that in the late 1940’s head coach Ted Dawson (who later in his career became the first head coach at Odessa Permian) was looking for an edge for his signal caller who had some vision issues. His first idea was to have his receivers wear white helmets while the rest of the team had blue helmets, but the UIL didn’t take too kindly to that idea. While grabbing lunch at a drug store in town, Dawson doodled some pants that were two-toned, blue in the front and white in the back. The problem of getting those pants made in the 1940’s was solved by a Waco sporting goods dealer and until the mid-1960’s they were a staple for the Wildcats. But then — for a few years — Temple went back to a more traditional look. They returned in the early 1970's, but it was legendary head coach Bob McQueen who brought them into statewide prominence as the Wildcats program soared to new heights and the term “Blue Front, White Back Magic” became a rallying cry. In 2011, when Mike Spradlin was hired to lead the program, he wanted to use the same uniform outfitter he used during his time at Abilene Cooper, but that major company at the time didn’t think they could produce the unique Temple pants combination. Spradlin told the company there was no way he was getting fired from his job before coaching a game, and if they couldn’t produce the pants, they’d use the company that made the pants previously. Needless to say, the major apparel outfitter known worldwide started making the pants shortly thereafter. Just another example of the power of TXHSFB.  

El Paso’s Jones Stadium

The crown jewel of the classic TXHSFB stadiums, Jones Stadium was built in 1916 and has been remarkably preserved. The stadium that hosted the first ever Sun Bowl is still doing it’s job as the home field for El Paso High. EPHS — known as the “Lady on the Hill” — wraps around the stadium in a semi-circle and from the top of the steps the stadium looks a little like a Roman Coliseum. You get a commanding view of the nearby Franklin Mountains and the lights of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico as well. Jones Stadium has won many online polls as the state’s best high school stadium and is the birthplace of Friday Night Lights as in 1928, Jones Stadium installed lights and hosted games on Friday nights. It’s evolved into a pilgrimage site for a lot of TXHSFB fans, and many who are unable to make a game there will always make it a point to visit the stadium even if it's the offseason. It really is that special.

Watch a Game In The Rio Grande Valley

In the Rio Grande Valley, there are fewer points of pride bigger than the local high school football team. After all, there are no college football teams nearby and the local favorites the Dallas Cowboys are a nine hour drive to the north. So it’s the locals who take center stage on Friday nights, as the local radio stations feature trash talk from opposing fan bases, the local news at 5,6 and 10 p.m. lead off with reports from the big games and tailgaters arrive hours before the games to fire up the grills among the palm trees prepping for the night. The stadiums are big and they are often filled to capacity, and the people couldn’t be kinder or more appreciative when they find out an “out of towner” came to watch their kids play and compete. No game embodies that more than the first ever game I witnessed in the Valley, the famous “Battle of the Arroyo” between Harlingen and San Benito. After an exciting first half of football in San Benito’s Morrow Stadium (that was filled to capacity at 12,000 seats), we were greeted with a halftime fireworks show. No, seriously!

Mid-County Madness

Voted the No. 1 rivalry in Texas by Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, I decided to make the trek down to the Golden Triangle to see this rivalry in person and as always it lived up to the hype. Two incredibly passionate fanbases, two neighboring communities, two student sections that get loud (and will pull a prank or two) and typically two really competitive teams that are always evenly matched. It makes for one big-time rivalry. You can expect 12-14,000 in attendance when these two play and more often than not it’s going to come down to the wire. They’ve played 95 times and in 2017 it was Nederland who upset unbeaten PNG to earn a share of the district title. In 2018, it was PNG who knocked off the unbeaten Bulldogs to spoil Nederland’s perfect campaign and earn a share of the district crown. Make no mistake about it, this rivalry is all that’s grand about TXHSFB. It’s so big it’s got two names as it’s also known as the “Bum Phillips Bowl." The Texas legend coached at Nederland from 1951-1956 and at Port Neches-Groves from 1963-1964.

Thanksgiving Night Playoff Game

Thanksgiving Night TXHSFB isn’t something that’s guaranteed to happen these days, but when those games do happen they are often special. In the old PVIL days, Houston Yates and Houston Wheatley would meet at old Jeppsen Stadium and often in front of crowds that often approached 40,000 fans, who came in their Sunday best for the annual showdown between Yates of the 3rd Ward and Wheatley of the 5th Ward. Integration into the UIL ended the Turkey Day Classic, as Thanksgiving Weekend now fell squarely in the middle of the UIL playoffs, and although most teams shy away from playing on Thursday night, legendary Celina head coach G.A. Moore relished the chance to play a playoff game on Thanksgiving night and get a jump on scouting the next week’s opponent if his Bobcats could pull off a win. Many six-man schools still to this day will compete in playoff games on Thanksgiving night and every few years we’ll get a UIL 11-man playoff game on Thanksgiving night. In 2017, Hamlin and Wheeler graced us with a little holiday football in the second round of the 2A Division II playoffs in Vernon. So when the playoffs roll around this year, keep an eye out for that rare nugget of a Thanksgiving night playoff showdown.

A Playoff Triple-Header

One of my earliest memories of big-time TXHSFB was riding to Texas Stadium with a group of friends to catch a Saturday playoff triple-header. The scale of everything just seemed bigger in that old stadium with a hole in the roof, and many of those memories of high school games at the old place are what caused so many of us to fall in love with the sport. In Houston, the same can be said for the old triple-headers at the Astrodome when Houston’s best teams would duke it out to advance towards the ultimate goal of a state championship. New stadiums have replaced Texas Stadium and the Astrodome, but the spectacle of the playoff triple-header lives on at AT&T Stadium, NRG Stadium and now in San Antonio at the Alamodome.

UIL State Championships

There’s no better weekend in the world if you are a football fan than UIL State Football Championship weekend. If you haven’t made the trip to the title games you are missing out on something incredibly special. Yes, our partners at Fox Sports Southwest do an incredible job of putting on a NFL-level broadcast for all twelve of the title games played from Wednesday through Saturday, but there’s just something special about the uniqueness of the event and the whole weekend, sending the season off in style. It’s the reason people from all over the country (and the world) put it on their to-do list every year. It’s the reason TXHSFB fans from every corner of the state flock to AT&T Stadium. It’s truly a football lover's paradise. From the six-man crowds on Wednesday that outnumber the population of the towns, to the TXHSFB giants that play on Saturday and everything in-between, it’s without a doubt the number one bucket list item in TXHSFB. Our tribute to the event last season (below) gives you a brief glimpse of the action.

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