Yea, in a lot of small towns in America, there isn't much else going on. Maybe hit hard by the recession, jobs moved away, etc. 'Friday Night Lights' is pretty accurate at least as far as how seriously people will take high school sports.

Unfortunately, in many areas it's the closest thing to "glory" or "importance" these towns have. It's grotesque all the way around: the horrible pressure put on coaches and players to ruin their bodies in their teens for a win, the scary depth of investment/projection by so many people, the majority of them grown ass…

Did you not get the reference to Steubenville? No, sentient people don't give a #)*$ about high school athletes but many Amuricans do. That's how they live out their fantasies in dead towns with no future.

Absolutely. There are many towns where high school sports are a fanatic part of the culture as much as collegiate and pro sports, if not more. Texas football in particular have attendance can get into the tens of thousands, with multi-million dollar stadiums.

4 Touchdowns in one game!

"Like who gives a fuck - it's high school."

as a college football fan, 100% yes. and it matters how many stars said star athlete has.

They're worshiped as local demigods.

Are you kidding? These idiots make big-budget movies about high-school football here. It's really weird.

In some small towns, the entire community can revolve around high school football.

every athlete you've ever seen on a billboard or mcdonalds advert was a star in highschool

I don't get it either. Fortunately, my small, rural town in the US did not have this kind of sports culture. At my school most of the athletes were above average students who just treated sports as an item to improve their university applications. Academics were the ticket to escape our depressing community and…

Generally, people in Texas and the southeastern states care a lot about high school football. Not so much in the rest of the country, except of course the parents of high school athletes.

Go watch Friday Night Lights. Not that far removed from the truth.

It's not just small towns. Even in places where no one outside of kids shows up to the game they're still revered as heroes inside the school and get away with things that the rest of the school can't do.

So, aside from being a proud Rapey-American who feels oppressed, you're threatened that white privilege is under attack? White Privilege is something you're afraid of losing?

I don't really think you can file gang raping and sodomizing a drunk girl with a foreign object under "young, drunk, and stupid"....unless your formative years were a lot different than most. What the hell would you consider a crime?

It's a shame they threw them away.

You overcharge so that there's a greater incentive to take a plea deal.

How do you think this happens? I am raising two boys and I take it very seriously. We are very careful to teach them about body autonomy and limits and appropriate touching and stuff like that. How do parents go wrong? How does a child do something like this? How?