This week's bizarre high school football score

Still jonesing for that 5-4 football score.

 

More and more teams are having to do that in Texas for the same reason. It's affecting small schools especially. There have always been a number of Thursday night games because of multiple 5A and 6A schools in the same ISD sharing stadiums, but the number of Thursday games has spiked.

 

It happened to us this week. One of the games in the area couldn’t find a crew for Friday, so they asked for some options, so we told them Saturday afternoon. And so it is. 3:00 kick.

 

One of our local schools has three Thursday night games among its last six, for different reasons. The first is tonight. We've got 20 minutes to kickoff at one of the saddest city school fields I've seen in a long time, waiting to cover a game that will end up 60-0, in front of a crowd numbering in double digits.
Fun times.

 

And now the 1980s era scoreboard is out. Yay.

 

There was someone doing something similar on YouTube in Kansas either last year or the year before, I can't remember for sure which. But it only appeared that year and hasn't been done by anyone since.

I think part of the problem is the number of schools pairing up with the NFHS Network. I can still find plenty of games to watch for free if I want to, including my hometown high school and the team I used to cover.

 

There's been a lot of bogus sites popping up to, as you can imagine. Joe Davidson of the Sacramento Bee has been good at spotting the scammers in that area.

 

I interviewed the guy running point on it (the host in that teaser video) and he said the NFHS Network partnerships were not deal breakers, they just make things more complicated. He said the NFHS was open to letting them use those streams, but the individual schools still needed to sign off on their end because those schools get a cut of the subscription fees. So it comes down to whether they want to give up some of that exclusivity or not.
To simplify things for this year, they're just using the schools who run their own free streams and can give permission with basically a phone call or email. He's hoping to add NFHS Network schools next year when they have more time to work on the details.

The really mind-blowing part is that they have to make arrangements with each school that they get the feeds from. If even just a third of the state's 300 high schools do livestreams of some sort, the amount of legwork it takes to get those clearances is staggering.

 

Those things are all over the comments on our paper's Facebook and Twitter pages. I'm trying to delete them as I see them, but it's like trying to turn back the tide sometimes.

 

It's gotten to the point now where I see some schools posting about where to get the real feed of their games and how to make sure you've got the right one.

kpreps.com posts links to the real feeds every week, though they don't necessarily post all of them. I know of two schools who have video streams that have never had their feed appear in the links.

But yeah, some weeks on YT you see a dozen or more bogus links to video feeds all over the place, not in just a particular state, trying to pull one over on someone's grandpa.

 

Sounds like I might have a good column idea for next week. Thanks, guys!