Friday Night Lights

After losing in the ALCS the year before, the Cleveland Indians are determined to make it into the World Series this time! However, they first have to contend with Rachel Phelps again when she buys back the team.

Veteran catcher Crash Davis is brought to the minor league Durham Bulls to help their up and coming pitching prospect, "Nuke" Laloosh. Their relationship gets off to a rocky start and is further complicated when baseball groupie Annie Savoy sets her sights on the two men.

Morris Buttermaker is a burned-out minor league baseball player who loves to drink and can't keep his hands to himself. His long-suffering lawyer arranges for him to manage a local Little League team, and Buttermaker soon finds himself the head of a rag-tag group of misfit players. Through unconventional team-building exercises and his offbeat coaching style, Buttermaker helps his hapless Bears prepare to meet their rivals, the Yankees.

In the racially divided town of Anderson, South Carolina in 1976, football coach Harold Jones spots a mentally disabled African-American young man nicknamed Radio near his practice field and is inspired to befriend him. Soon, Radio is Jones' loyal assistant, and he becomes a student at T.L. Hanna High School. But things start to sour when Coach Jones begins taking guff from parents and fans who feel that his devotion to Radio is getting in the way of the team's quest for a championship.

Jim Morris never made it out of the minor leagues before a shoulder injury ended his pitching career twelve years ago. Now a married-with-children high-school chemistry teacher and baseball coach in Texas, Jim's team makes a deal with him: if they win the district championship, Jim will try out with a major-league organization. The bet proves incentive enough for the team, and they go from worst to first, making it to state for the first time in the history of the school. Jim, forced to live up to his end of the deal, is nearly laughed off the try-out field--until he gets onto the mound, where he confounds the scouts (and himself) by clocking successive 98 mph fastballs, good enough for a minor-league contract with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Jim's still got a lot of pitches to throw before he makes it to The Show, but with his big-league dreams revived, there's no telling where he could go.

Maverick old-guard coach Jimmy McGinty is hired in the wake of a players' strike to help the Washington Sentinels advance to the playoffs. But that impossible dream hinges on whether his replacements can hunker down and do the job. So, McGinty dusts off his secret dossier of ex-players who never got a chance (or screwed up the one they were given) and knits together a bad-dream team of guys who just may give the Sentinels their title shot.

In small-town Texas, high school football is a religion, 17-year-old schoolboys carry the hopes of an entire community onto the gridiron every Friday night. When star quarterback Lance Harbor suffers an injury, the Coyotes are forced to regroup under the questionable leadership of John Moxon, a second-string quarterback with a slightly irreverent approach to the game.

When a plane crash claims the lives of members of the Marshall University football team and some of its fans, the team's new coach and his surviving players try to keep the football program alive.