Friday Night Lights, Season 3

Hanna, I dunno about Tyra's system of man points. I mean, what am I missing here, because I don't see how this is different from the usual yardstick of masculine cool. Landry loses points for being fussy and wins them for being onstage in the band with the rockin' gig. If Billy had pulled off the leaf blower thing with a slick swagger, then maybe, maybe. But he got laughed at, so he loses. Tim gets man points in this episode only for his powerful blocking and running on the field. And Obama got them last week only for telling the country that he has a hard job and these are hard times. Arugula, nyet.

Speaking of football, I was puzzled by the episode a few weeks ago, when Coach goes for it on fourth-and-12 instead of punting—the latter seemed like the much more obvious call. In this episode, was there any reason Eric would have gone for two after the TD—given that it was raining like crazy, the team hadn't done it all year (according to the announcers), and J.D. is a frosh quarterback? Coach's call seemed blatantly orchestrated to set up Joe's explosion. Why not kick the extra point?

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Then I remembered that in Friday Night Lights the nonfiction book, the team that the Dillon Panthers are based on finishes the season with a record equal to a rival team. Only one of them can go to state. And so the coaches meet at a central location for a coin-tossing ritual. This is what the rules called for. Craziness.

One other football point reaching back to last week's episode: Meghan and I both thought that Coach Taylor got ejected from that game because he lost it. I got several e-mails from readers who thought that coach blew up deliberately to rally the team behind his display of passion. My husband thought so, too. I'm not convinced, because of the speech Eric made to the team about keeping their heads down, because he seemed frantic when he called Wade from his cell phone after getting tossed, and because it's just not in Eric's DNA to deliberately act like one of the kids. Can anyone out there settle this definitively?

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