Ty Cashion's account of the Longview coach's battle in the 1998 book Pigskin Pulpit came from his father, Bob, an assistant under Bain. For his book, Cashion conducted more than 200 hours of interviews with more than 80 high school coaches. The tone is what one might expect from the son of a coach. Cashion apparently thought it necessary to defend the sport in an era when it appears to be less important to Texans. The number of players participating in football goes down every year, as it goes up in other sports.
Attendance is down, too, particularly in urban settings.
Football still is king in Texas, but no longer by acclimation, and our changing attitude about it says much about what we have become as a culture. A goodly number fancy themselves experts, and what they seem to be saying is that we, as coaches, have set our sights on winning at the expense of the players and everything else. If the coaches did that, it usually was because that's what the fans wanted. One of the worst places any team could venture in an earlier generation of football was Wichita Falls' Coyote Canyon. The visitors' bench sat right next to the fence, and only a few feet separated it from the sideline.