[via Grantland] The summary from Vulture pretty much sums up the money moments:

Friday Night Lights has its series finale tomorrow (again), and if you’re even a little bit invested in Coach, Tami, and the citizens of Dillon, this oral history will stir up some real and serious feelings. Kyle Chandler was “hungover as shit” when he auditioned, says Peter Berg. (Ha!) When the new cast of Dillion Lions assembled for season three, Chandler had a true Eric Taylor moment. “Kyle stood up and, in Coach fashion, gave a kind of pep talk — brief, specific, and heartfelt,” says Matt Lauria. (Awww!) Chandler and Connie Britton hit it off so well that people were worried they were having an affair. (Sigh!) And after the series wrap party, the cast and crew played touch football at two in the morning in their old uniforms. (Time for real tears.) Also, strangely, the leap to DirecTV was orchestrated by Tom Arnold. [via Vulture]

[via AfterElton] Pretty solid/supported theory. But can the show pull it off in seven episodes? This character doesn’t have much else going on…Final season. DO IT.

Episode 1, “East of Dillon”: Disoriented.
Episode 2, “After the Fall”: Uplifted, but still fundamentally concerned.
Episode 3, “In the Skin of a Lion”: Stressed.
Episode 4, “A Sort of Homecoming”: Uplifted, but still fundamentally concerned.
Episode 5, “The Son”: Depression, sadness, despair, leading to cathartic super-cry.
Episode 6, “Stay”: Optimistic, then realistic about the fate of high-school love.
Episode 7, “In the Bag”: Anxious.
Episode 8, “The Toilet Bowl”: Wishing Tami Taylor were your mother.
Episode 9, “The Lights in Carroll Park”: Uplifted, but still fundamentally concerned (about one character in particular).
Episode 10, “I Can’t”: Emotionally drained, wiped out, annihilated.
Episode 11, “Injury List”: Frustrated, angry, overly involved
Episode 12. “Laboring”: Just fundamentally concerned.
Episode 13, “Thanksgiving”: Ecstatic, and then confused that you’re not more ecstatic. [via Vulture]

A half-dozen of Louis Dale’s teammates huddled around a TV in Cornell’s locker room waiting to see if the Big Red’s point guard actually would go through with it.

The it was dropping the team’s favorite quote from the movie “Friday Night Lights” at the postgame news conference just moments after 12th-seeded Cornell secured a Sweet 16 berth by routing fourth-seeded Wisconsin 87-69 in an East Region second-round game Sunday.

“We’ve got eight seniors on this team, and we want to take this ride as long as we can because after this it’s just nothing but babies and memories, so we’ll just keep going,” Dale said.

[via Yahoo Sports]

kgtl:

This list is best taken “in no particular order”

Excellent list. I love every one of those shows.

And I agree: Putting these shows in order is pretty much impossible.

A touchdown for Bree’s cousins playing DL at Arnett Mead. AM is the arch rival of the Dillon Panthers on Friday Night Lights Plus 6. —ACharmer

No one from Texas would ever say they are from “the south.” Texans are Texans before they are Americans. Minus 5 —TMT337

(Via Keaton’s facebook. See KGTL)

Gladwell makes some scary comparisons between football and dog fighting. He outlines all of the plights of football players and their brain injuries. He also pointed out how Nascar has gone to great lengths to make their sport safer. Meanwhile, football was almost abolished at the beginning of the 20th Century because it was so brutal. Some rule changes made it safer, though, as we know today, not perfect. Hits to the head build up over time, creating irreparable damage.

Much of the attention in the football world, in the past few years, has been on concussions—on diagnosing, managing, and preventing them—and on figuring out how many concussions a player can have before he should call it quits. But a football player’s real issue isn’t simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It’s not just the handful of big hits that matter. It’s lots of little hits, too. That’s why, Cantu says, so many of the ex-players who have been given a diagnosis of C.T.E. were linemen: line play lends itself to lots of little hits.

There is no quick solution with a game like this.

“People love technological solutions,” Nowinski went on. “When I give speeches, the first question is always: ‘What about these new helmets I hear about?’ What most people don’t realize is that we are decades, if not forever, from having a helmet that would fix the problem. I mean, you have two men running into each other at full speed and you think a little bit of plastic and padding could absorb that 150 gs of force?”

How is this like dog fighting?

ameness, Carl Semencic argues, in “The World of Fighting Dogs” (1984), is no more than a dog’s “desire to please an owner at any expense to itself.” The owners, Semencic goes on,

understand this desire to please on the part of the dog and capitalize on it. At any organized pit fight in which two dogs are really going at each other wholeheartedly, one can observe the owner of each dog changing his position at pit-side in order to be in sight of his dog at all times. The owner knows that seeing his master rooting him on will make a dog work all the harder to please its master.

Professional football players, too, are selected for gameness…He had taken the hit on behalf of his team. He was then left to pass out in the cold tub, and to deal—ten and twenty years down the road—with the consequences. No amount of money or assurances about risk freely assumed can change the fact that, in this moment, an essential bond had been broken. What football must confront, in the end, is not just the problem of injuries or scientific findings. It is the fact that there is something profoundly awry in the relationship between the players and the game.

There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else—neither considerations of science nor those of morality—can compete with the destructive power of that love.

I kept thinking of the pilot of “Friday Night Lights” when that player takes the paralyzing hit, another possible danger in the game. Especially when you’ve got kids starting to play that young, society has to take some sort of responsibility for these people’s bodies.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE. You won’t be disappointed.

The Yankees’ wives and girlfriends have been banned from trashing Kate Hudson after Page Six revealed there was coldness between her and Derek Jeter’s squeeze, Minka Kelly. We told how low-key Kelly disapproved of Hudson’s antics including cheering wildly from the front row and smooching A-Rod all over town. A source said, “The Yankees told the girls to be careful who they spoke to about Kate. They are concerned about the ramifications for the players.”

Tension between Jeter and ARod that is.

Kate Hudson is annoying, but she made “Almost Famous” many years ago. And for that I’ll let some shit go.

Though a lot of actresses could have done Penny Lane well. Like Minka Kelly, who’s actually around the same age. And is in the amazing “Friday Night Lights.” And can have the career that Hudson should have had. And she better do that instead of just being another Yankee wife. Seriously, do not quit acting, Minka.

It amuses me to think that Jorge Posada’s wife is like the queen Yankee wife cuz he’s been with them for so long and Jeter isn’t married—and she hates Kate Hudson because she is really enthusiastic.

Yep, this is my post-playoff post.