I saw the movie years ago, don't know the TV series. Recommended to me by someone in a position to know something about the subject, not an endorsement but just the correct sense that I'd find it interesting.

Yes, indeed, very interesting, in all kinds of ways, from the individual psyches and circumstances of several players, coaches, and families to the macro-socio-economic. While there's a little gender action (notions of masculinity, virility, etc.), the women are pretty thinly drawn. Instead, race and class cut most deeply through the narrative. These I get, and everything that Bissinger reports rings true to what I see in the world around me.

The particular form of American national identity manifest in Texas, or, to put it another way, Texan identity, is illuminated well but I still can't get the why of it, can't get how this particular phenomenology hangs together. Texas remains a puzzle to me, and I think the author captures its essential idiosyncrasy when he quotes someone as saying that you have to breathe that dirt and feel that heat, see that horizon, do so deep and long and existentially, to really get it.

I won't say much about football and what it represents. I am still pondering that question and may need to do so for a good long while.