The casting and performances on “Friday Night Lights” are so famously top-notch every week that the slightest deviation from the sublime can really irritate (see my harping about Kyle Chandler last week) and, at the same time any moment can get lost in the whole. So let’s take some time to celebrate Brad Leland as Buddy Garrity, the most purely avid patron of high school football in all of Dillon (O.K. maybe all of Texas). I say “purely” because Buddy has been supplanted this season and last by the twisted Panther fanatic Joe McCoy whose interest in Panther football is more or less entirely a function of his obsessive control of his star quarterback son. Except for Julie Taylor no kid in Dillon really avoids abuse of some kind – mostly it is the abuse of absent parentage – but in young J.D. McCoy’s case the abuse is both emotional and physical. Joe McCoy is a really, really awful guy – venal, entitled, misogynistic- – and Buddy has finally had enough of him. Poolside at Joe’s giant house – a house that seems like one big wet bar – Buddy gives it to him and calls him a cancer for poisoning the well of Dillon football love with his base antagonisms and threats and psycho micro-managing.

The moment was as good as any Brad Leland has produced. He told the Panther Boosters that he was no longer a Panther, McCoy was just too dangerous. And really, who had ever been more consistently devoted to the team than Buddy? He admitted to having planted a mailbox on an empty lot to insure that a desired player who lived on the wrong side of town would be able to play for Dillon High. This was 15 years ago. But now, he admitted he was in the business of getting the best players over to East Dillon High.

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