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Why Texas needs to remember the difference

Texans love to talk about high school football. And, often, we discuss it as if it exists in a vacuum — as if it’s just Friday nights, marching bands, and small-town pride. But if we take the time to study its history, that look back keeps reminding us that the game has always been shaped by forces far bigger than a scoreboard.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the vanished 1955 season opener between Yoakum and Robstown — a game that disappeared not because of weather or scheduling issues, but because one school district refused to play an integrated opponent.

Teenagers from both towns trained for that game. They prepared for it. They expected to play.

And then adults in corridors of power, however innocuous they may have seemed at the time, quietly erased it from the record books because of who was allowed to share a field with whom.

That wasn’t about football. That was about control.

After I wrote that piece, I started focusing on House Bill 72 — Texas’ now-entrenched ‘no pass/no play’ law.

Now, before you begin wondering why I’d be meditating on that, it happened while I was researching the football history of Austin’s Lanier High School — now Austin Navarro — and reading a mid-1980s yearbook reflection about how that season felt disrupted and diminished, because “House Bill 72…made a lot of key players ineligible for the rest of the season.”

With forty years of distance, it’s easy to see how those kids felt the emotional sting of their team losing depth and continuity. That disappointment was real. But history also gives us the perspective to see that it wasn’t the same kind of devastation that stripped opportunity and dignity from players in the 1950s.

House Bill 72 absolutely caused disruption. Eligibility rules changed. Academic standards tightened. Schools struggled to adapt. Some football teams lost depth. Some kids lost playing time or opportunities they would have had under the old system. For those teenagers, that loss was real.

But there’s a critical difference between what happened then and what happened in places like Yoakum in 1955.

HB-72 was a policy shift that made school — and by extension athletics — harder for some students. It was clumsy. It was unevenly applied. And it carried unintended consequences.

Segregation was something else entirely.

In the 1950s, community leaders and elected officials across Texas and the South didn’t stumble into excluding kids from competition. They fought for it. They held meetings. They made phone calls. They leaned on superintendents and school boards. They canceled games and upended schedules if it meant keeping certain players off the field.

That wasn’t an accident. That was a choice.

The attitude behind it was captured years later in Bruce Hornsby’s haunting lyric:

“That’s just the way it is… some things will never change.”

In the Jim Crow South, that fatalism wasn’t a lament — it was an excuse. It allowed people to say, “It’s nothing personal,” while doing something deeply personal to the kids whose dreams they were crushing.

That’s why it matters how we talk about history.

You can grieve what HB-72 did to some football programs and still acknowledge that it wasn’t designed to tell kids they didn’t belong. You can criticize its rollout without pretending it’s morally equivalent to a system that decided, outright, that certain skin colors disqualified you from the game.

One was a state trying to modernize education and stumbling along the way. The other was a state clinging to a racial hierarchy and using football to enforce it.

One is unfortunate. The other is truly pathetic.

Texas high school football has always reflected who we are — not just what we love. And if we’re going to honor the game, we owe it to the kids who wore those uniforms to tell the truth about the systems that shaped their chances to play.

Because it is not now, and never was, just a game.

It has always been about who gets to be part of the story.