25 years ago, ‘Varsity Blues’ was all about “sex and football”

“I. Don’t Want. Your Life”

Varsity Blues is an odd duck of a sports movie. It tells a small-town West Texas high school football story, steeped in classical Americana, while never veering particularly far from the most established of sports movie cliches. 

But it also offers strange subplots like a high school health teacher moonlighting as a stripper (at a club called “The Landing Strip”) and that business with the girl and her whipped-cream bikini. And Varsity Blues isn’t especially shy about depicting Southern characters as inarticulate hicks- even its hero quarterback is a book-smart intellectual who dreams of escaping Texas and heading to the Ivy League.