For many years, the biggest high school football rivalry in Slagfield, Texas, was definitely between Northside and Southwest. But once the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the School Freedom and Flag Act, which made public schools illegal, the race was on to see which of the new for-profit schools would dominate high school football Friday nights.
     “All those women always nagging about choice?” State Senator Jess Haukey smirked into the camera. “Now they got to choose a new school real fast.”
     A country suddenly without public schools is a lawless frontier, so the end of public schools drew more wealth-seeking newcomers than California’s 1849 Gold Rush. It was wild. Disruptive.
     There were plenty of new schools to choose from in that first year, before many were shut down due to mergers and acquisitions, IRS investigations, buyouts, asset-stripping bankruptcies, those three shootings, and suspicious fires.
     But the chaos abated. Just two years after the Supreme Court decision, everyone in Slagsfield knew the two high schools that would forever fight for bragging rights as the undisputed football bullies: Patriot Prep, and Kracken Tech.
     The feud was personal for two former friends. Peter Blount was Kracken Tech’s VP for Athletics, known for his monomaniacal will to win, and his former friend Buster Kittwist, who had the same position with Patriot Prep. Their feud led to their making a serious bet on the game against each other. They booked their wager through the new BetRoulette app from the Interscholastic Betting Foundation, LLC.
     Everyone in Slagsfield argued about the big game long before the two powerhouses finally met on the field to determine the champion. That was cleverly scheduled to be the last game of the season, to build suspense and the TV audience, and to keep the sports betting businesses humming.
     Finally relieved of the right to moderate content, social media platforms were loaded with betting advice, fake team analyses, counterfeit playbooks, menacing trolling, overt threats, and deepfake videos of opposition school chicanery.
     While the town was about evenly divided in their expectations of the eventual winner, serious high school football fans tended to agree at least on the team analyses and comparisons.
Patriot Prep had the most intense coaches, and built their team around power and intimidation, rather than speed or smarts. The Patriot Palookas’ game plan was simple and old style: drive forward no matter what, badger the referees, and rough up the opposition.
     Patriot Prep’s critics were morally outraged, but to be fair the league had no specific penalty rules about stomping, gouging, and groin kicks. “If the league founders had opposed gouging and kidney punches,” the Congressman Thaddeus Gold told the local TV station, “they would have said so in their rulebook. Ain’t nothing in the book about low blows.”
     “We got ourselves a good, conservative playbook,” one major Patriot Prep booster told reporters. “It’s like the 1920s again,” he bragged, since each play intended to achieve the classically simple, if obsolete, “three yards and a cloud of dust.”
     Patriot Prep had no real passing game, since that would require quick thinking, cooperation, planning, practice, speed and agility. Not needing skilled players, the coaches outsourced student-athlete recruiting to local oilfield HR departments, who always prized strength, obedience, and a bull-headed refusal to quit, no matter what. Yes, the Palookas’ game was all about power. You could ask the local emergency rooms on game days.
     But their major rival could not be ignored. Kracken Tech’s team, the Krackers, sometimes mocked as the Kracken Technicalities, did not rely on power. Instead, their game style favored unpredictability and reversal. They did not have a printed playbook, relying instead on hasty improvisation.
     Kracken Tech’s coaching staff depended on trick plays, contradictory audibles shouted out simultaneously by several players, misdirection, distracting taunts, fake handoffs, constant backfield shifts, laterals to beefy linemen, quick kicks, unbalanced lines, pitch-backs, and hail-marys. The school also favored relentless sideline attacks against the refs. To be fair, most of those sideline attacks were just verbal, and were often followed by conciliatory assurances that no malice was intended (“What’s the matter, can’t you take a joke?”).
     The Kracken Tech coaches, players, and fans had a reputation for disputing every negative call, demanding procedural penalties against opponents, and tampering with the game clock. They always tried to slow down the game to deny their opponents any momentum. “Fortune favors the bold,” a Kracken Tech life coach said at convocation, “and Chaos favors the lucky.” She had copyrighted that saying days before, just in case it went viral.
     Both schools went undefeated as they headed to their showdown. Their competition in Slagfield showed their weaknesses from the opening kickoffs. Each opponent’s weakness was immediately obvious, and much discussed in taverns and casual restaurants following the Friday games.
     Clientology High High School fell apart in every game on their first play on offense. Their coaching staff had withheld the playbook and game plan because the players were not yet ready to know them. Suspicion was that the coaches themselves at Clientology High High were not themselves yet deemed ready to know the playbook.
     The evangelical schools took all the fun out of the game for their opponents, by declaring each lopsided loss a moral victory, but also an urgent reminder from a vengeful God that losers have to tithe harder.
     Patriot Prep looked stronger than Kracken Tech during the regular season. When they attacked and defeated the only remaining Catholic schools, the headlines were “Palookas whip St. Francis” and “Palookas manhandle St. Mary.” When they demolished the progressive Library School, the headline was “Palookas own the Libs, 42-0.”
     While the two teams were winning on field, their ardent supporters were showing their school spirit throughout Slagfield. Kracken Tech fans secretly organized a false flag operation, doing a ransomware attack on the city administration, shutting down city services and blaming Patriot Prep’s librarians. Patriot Prep fans held a fake Kracken Tech fund-raising bake sale, spiking the cookies with drugs stolen from the police evidence locker.
     Patriot Prep tricked a mob of grandmas into disrupting a Kracken school board budget meeting, falsely claiming they were planning intramural sodomy teams. Kracken Tech supporters started a social media rumor campaign reporting that Patriot Prep coaches were molesting Christian puppies in a secret basement at the car dealership run by Patriot Prep’s biggest booster.
     These guerrilla operations escalated, and caught the attention of national media. When a student from Kracken Tech and a student from Patriot Prep were caught kissing at a fast food dumpster, ignoring the rivalry, the internet really did break for a few hours.
     The long-anticipated national civil war seemed to have begun. Or would break out when the game started. The Texas governor called out the national guard, but before the soldiers could even board their buses, fights broke out among the soldiers over which school should win.
The fans were ready, since all of the bars in town hosted “happy hours” for the 24 hours before kickoff. The many open-carry fans were locked and really loaded.
     By the day of the big showdown game, tensions were intense. Police helicopters were grounded because too many fan drones were in the athletic field airspace. The game was live streamed by hundreds of fans using cell phones, and national media had brought in construction cranes to get camera crews into good position.
     Like most football games, this one started with great excitement and quickly became a disappointment. Kracken won the second coin toss, after disputing the first, and Patriot Prep kicked off. But just as Kracken’s star kick returner was about to catch the kick, the stadium lights went off.
     “WTF!” Kracken fans said in unison, and then watched in horror as the lights came back on just in time to show the kick hitting the ground close to the confused returner, and bouncing toward the end zone. Foul play was suspected when two players on Patriot Prep’s kickoff team were discovered to be wearing night vision goggles. The two players insisted that Antifa moles on the Kracken return team slipped the goggles over their helmets in the dark. Local lawyers were delighted.
     Before the refs could sort all that out, a fleet of drones programmed to sound like Stukas drove down over the Patriot Prep side of the field, dropping cow pies on the bench players and fans in the VIP seats. Everyone panicked.
     Kracken Tech fans had only a moment to enjoy the sight and sound before a rival squadron of drones flew in low from the other side of the stadium and dropped red, white, and blue flares on Kracken fans. Only a few fans caught fire, but all the others quickly lost interest in the game.
Buster Kittwist’s cellphone went off immediately. When he heard the Hail to the Chief ringtone, he knew it was the governor. Over the phone, the governor heard gunfire and screams in the stadium, and Buster heard shouting in the governor’s office.
     “Antifa is attacking! Buster. Cancel that game right quick.” The governor didn’t wait for a reply, which left Buster available to take the next call, from his arch rival, Peter Blount.
     “Buster, we got to call this off. The game and the bet.”
     Buster had prepared for this. “Maybe this has to end our football rivalry, Peter. But we can keep the school rivalry and the lucrative broadcast contract alive. Not football. Something else, something not played out in a stadium full of rioters.”
     Peter said nothing. Texans weren’t going to give up football and care about soccer or golf. Then he had an idea.
     “Football is so last election. Next year, Buster, let’s settle this with a more appropriate sport. No fans present, just network cameras.”
     Buster paused, suspicious and wary. “You can’t mean tennis, please.”
     “No, I mean a sports that is more American than football.” Buster could not imagine what that could be.
     “I mean . . . paintball.”
     “You’re on! Guns up!”