Because Buzz Bissinger and I are Twitter pals,* I have learned that Gary Gaines, who was made famous through Bissinger’s novel “Friday Night Lights,” is returning to be the head football coach at Odessa-Permian High in Texas after 19 seasons.

Gaines, the coach at the center of Bissinger’s book who is also depicted in the NBC TV series, left Odessa for college coaching following Odessa’s state title victory in 1989. With Odessa looking for a new coach for the upcoming season, the school board voted to rehire Gaines as a consultant to help in the search. Then, Dick Cheney-like, he decided to take the job himself.

(* = May not be Twitter pals). Read more…

At my high school we had football coaches who weren’t really football coaches. They were just gym teachers or history teachers looking to pick up an extra paycheck on the side. So as you’d expect, we weren’t really the most well-coached team in the area, and our record reflected this.

Too bad we didn’t have the sons of any Hall of Fame quarterbacks at our school, or maybe we could have convinced their dad to come teach us how to actually play the game. Oaks Christian in California, who has actual football coaches, does have the son of a Hall of Famer on their team in Nick Montana, and now his father has signed on to be an assistant coach with the team.

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• Ole Miss basketball coach Andy Kennedy returns to Cincinnati in grand fashion - by assaulting a cab driver with fists & racial slurs.

• Could we see Manny Ramirez in pinstripes before too long?

• Eddy Curry has casually avoided a $41,000 bill from Casual Male.

• Ex-Hoosier Eric Gordon says drugs did in Indiana’s season last year.

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You know the story: high school football in Texas isn’t just a game, it’s a way of life. From “Friday Night Lights” to “Varsity Blues,” you’ve had the fact that people in Texas treat high school football as a matter of life and death drilled into your head time and again so much that it’s become a cliche.

But now there’s a new twist to the story. The ASSOCIATED PRESS has tested samples from the artificial turf at two stadiums in Texas - including Ratliff Stadium, home of the Permian Panthers from the original “Friday Night Lights” book - and found levels of lead from 10 to 14 times higher than the EPA standard. So high school football might actually be becoming a life and death issue in Texas, as in “the fields are slowly killing the players.”

Read more…