The XX Factor: What women really think.

Getting in on the Friday Night Lights Game

At the risk of an overdose of Friday Night Lights fandom here at Slate, I'd like to link up to the great FNL "TV Club." And what could be more fitting here on XX than leaping to a defense of Tami in her dealing with the JumboTron drama. I don't see the humiliation that made Hanna cringe, or real wrong-headedness, either. Yes, as Meghan and Emily have emphasized, it was clear from the start that Tami would lose her fight to put academics above football. It was also clear that Eric knew she would lose, and I agree that her opponents are (alas) on pretty solid ground: Donors should be able to expect to get what they thought they paid for.

What wasn't so clear was 1) whether Eric was setting Tami up for a fall by not telling her what he thought, and 2) how blind she really was about her uphill battle. The answers, which I thought emerged in this latest episode, are that both of them—he more consciously than she—felt that making a very public point about Dillon's pigskin-skewed values was worth Tami blowing her honeymoon as principal. (In fact, she surely won points with her teachers by lobbying on behalf of supplies and staff!) The coach wasn't about to talk her though her position as she agonized and vented to him, because he knew Tami had to proceed in her own inimitably passionate way. Nor did she really need to be told by her husband—teary though she was—that, despite the loss, it had been worth it. On some level, she knew it. And it's what Dillon (and we and Tami herself) expect from her.

It's interesting that Eric did need to talk through his quarterback dilemma with Tami. These aren't quite the gender stereotypes we're used to, especially in the red-state realm: husbands who ask for directions (but hold back from giving them) and wives ready to trust their own guts and plow ahead. Here, too, I think Eric is totally (and rightly) prepared to lose, while knowing that he, like Tami, has the priorities straight. In Dillon, the Taylors are the rare couple with the luxury, and security, not to have to cling quite so hard to the football ethos of winning at any cost.