Scoreboard

When you research narratives for a living you can’t help seeing them everywhere.

Our politics are awash with them, of course. They are the water in which we swim, these broad, sweeping stories that force facts and evidence into the background. These are stories designed to make us feel more and think less, custom-made so that we can slot them effortlessly as some piece of our identity. Financial markets sometimes seem more real to us than politics, but they only seem that way because we have things we can measure at any given time. In the end, though, price is still just some guy’s opinion, and what is a market but a whole lot of some guys? No, whether we are reading about markets, media, politics, entertainment, celebrities, or world events, it’s narratives all the way down.

Sports, though? Sports are different. They may be the only place left in the world where the score is always the score, the only place where the old Bill Parcells adage holds true: that you are what your record says you are. It isn’t that sports are immune to Narrative. Quite the opposite, in fact. Sports media might be more narrative-driven than any other major media category. This player is an underdog and that one plays the game The Right Way. This one is an enforcer and that one is a diva and that one isn’t loyal and that one gets all the calls because the league office loves him. This franchise is historic and that one is run like a circus. No, sports aren’t immune to narrative.

But the scoreboard is.

Towns like West Columbia don’t get grand narratives.

These days getting there means spending about an hour and change on the Nolan Ryan Expressway southbound out of Houston. Back in the 1830s, wading through the swamps and bayous of Brazoria County took a lot longer. Hell, you’d have been on lands owned by Stephen F. Austin for a couple hours alone before you made it into the early makings of a town there near the banks of the Brazos River. And that’s precisely where you would have found yourself if you were a member of the inaugural Congress of the Republic of Texas in 1836. Before the capital was in Houston or Austin, it was in this little town on the mighty Brazos.

But you probably never read about that one, and even if you had, there’s no grand narrative to be found there either. Just a little historical marker on a corner next to a Walgreens and opposite an HEB and what used to be one of the first Buc-ee’s stations in the world. There’s no grand narrative at least in part because the town was so small that it literally didn’t have enough houses to accommodate the Texian officials who traveled there. Its time as the capital was short-lived. Indeed, the town as it exists today was shaped by other forces and other men.

One of those men was a former slave named Charlie Brown. He came to the little post-bellum post-plantation town some time after the war out of a farm in Virginia, illiterate and uneducated. Through the 1880s and 1890s he accumulated thousands of acres of land and a half dozen agricultural processing industries. Mills, cotton gins, that kind of thing. He went from nothing to multi-millionaire on Austin’s old stomping grounds, quickly becoming the richest black man in Texas. Family histories tell us about his leadership in the nation’s very first Juneteenth celebrations. Town history tells us that many of the town’s municipal buildings, churches, and schools today only exist because he donated land for them back when his own kids wouldn’t be allowed inside. The elementary school in town today still bears his name in honor of the school for black children he also funded during the height of segregation. Those children still bore the consequences of being born black in Texas at the wrong time. Even his own.

But it’s hard to be shaped by anything in small town Texas without being shaped by oil. West Columbia is no exception. Oil discoveries in the area brought prosperity and growth in the early 1900s. The Great Depression killed that and almost killed the town. The return of oil and gas companies after the war brought it back to life. No generic eagle, Indian, or warrior mascots here. The mascot at Columbia High School was and is a Roughneck. The junior high? They’re the Roustabouts. This was an oil town.

But when the oil crash came along back in ’86, the town crashed along with it. The oil companies left forever, at least until they could build pipelines to pump gas out to Freeport in the last decade or so. But the damage was done. The local economy became a place where people lived and commuted to places nearby with lingering industry. Mostly Lake Jackson, which had a half dozen large-scale chemical plants. At the margin, that meant you could still make money running a machine shop or small-scale specialty industrial business that could do some work with Dow or Celanese on occasion. But for the most part the economy transitioned to one serving the people who lived there and worked somewhere else with basic services. Grocers, hair salons, cafes, that sort of thing. Every year the town got smaller, the schools got smaller, the tax base dwindled, and young people left.

There are stories here, but no grand narratives. There are a million towns like this in America, towns with stories that mean absolutely everything to thousands and absolutely nothing to billions.

The local high school didn’t have much of a grand narrative either.

Unless your view of grand is expansive enough to include 21 Jump Street. You see, for quite some time, the school’s main claim to fame has been a months-long sting operation in which an officer posed as a student and successfully bought enough narcotics and prescription meds from other students to get Stephen Miller frothing at the mouth and muttering something about prisons in El Salvador. But for the most part, it was pretty much like any high school in any small town in southeast Texas. Football crazy, but not West Texas football crazy. Think one part Friday Night Lights, two parts Napoleon Dynamite.

Maybe half a part Friday Night Lights.

Problem with a shrinking town, shrinking budgets, and trouble getting younger people to stick around is that it’s harder to tell a story about the place that will get people with kids to move there who don’t have to be there. Your talent pool is what it is, and for the most part what it is is a far cry from the period in the 1970s when future Pro Bowl players played there. When you’re handed that situation, you’ve gotta make lemonade. After a few decades of stagnation against the big, well-funded suburban high schools around the state, the Roughnecks did just that by running a Wing-T offense.

The idea behind this and similar schemes is to make the most of a common situation: you’ve got a couple high-end athletes and a bunch of other guys who rate as pretty ordinary student athletes from a small-town high school. In this run-oriented scheme, you’ve usually got a featured back, a back in motion who could block or be the runner, and a third back who’s probably getting called into a lead blocker role more often than not. Coupled with blocking techniques designed to open specific angles and running lanes, it allows a smaller offensive line and a weaker group of receivers to churn out yards on the ground, keep the game close by chewing some clock, and hell, if they have a couple dynamic players in the backfield, maybe even win some games.

And if they have a Cam Ward? It lets them do a lot more than that.

If you don’t know the name, you will. Next Thursday at around 8:30 ET, Ward will have his name announced, hop on stage, bearhug NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, and put on a Tennessee Titans hat as the first overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft. It is as unlikely a draft story as you will ever hear, which is saying something given the penchant of sports media to craft, exaggerate, and promote every sad, salacious, inspiring, or triumphant angle they can about every draft pick.

In that run-heavy offense in which Ward played, as it happens, supremely athletic 6’2″ quarterbacks don’t get much opportunity to show off what colleges care about at the position – how they throw the ball. Taken together with the fact that his high school hadn’t really been a football powerhouse for the better part of half a century, the result was that Ward was a zero star recruit by the major prep athlete ratings publishers. His family drove him everywhere, sent him to camps, anything to catch the eye of a recruiter. His record-setting high school basketball career didn’t help much either. He finally got a shot with the football program of the University of the Incarnate Word, a 9,000-student FCS college in San Antonio.

Ward lit the world on fire, and the rest is history.

I think it would be easy to recount that history as a story of an exceptional person whose athletic brilliance, attitude, and work ethic proved that narratives don’t matter when the scoreboard is lit. And it is decidedly that. But it isn’t only that. It is also the story of a man and a family who actively chose on multiple occasions to reject the opportunity to optimize narrative in favor of another, more authentic set of values. There were nearby towns and schools with better ‘brands’ and college placement opportunities. Even some where cousins with NFL pedigrees had attended. But West Columbia was home. It’s where he grew up. It’s where his mom worked, and his dad worked just the next town over.

When his coaches were hired out of Incarnate Word for larger programs and he entered the transfer portal, the now in-demand Ward was courted by traditional power schools in power conferences with powerful narratives of success getting players in the NFL. But he knew what he had in his coaches’ offensive scheme. He trusted them. He was loyal to them. He also knew that they were the path to better actual results on the field. So he followed them to Washington State. If you’re not a football fan – earmuffs, Wazzu faithful – when it comes to reputation for placing players, Washington State is not the SEC. It didn’t matter. Cam lit the world on fire again. And then one last time at the University of Miami.

Any time somebody thumbs their nose at designing their life around optimizing some public-facing narrative, I think, is cause for celebration. But barring an earthshattering surprise, when he steps on stage next Thursday, ahead of 250 extraordinary 4- and 5-star recruits out of pedigreed prep programs with offenses designed to appeal to college recruiters, feted in their teens by college coaches with guarantees of play time in pro-style offenses designed to appeal to NFL scouts, Cam Ward gets to do what only a life full of authentic choices affords a man – the opportunity to point at the sky and tell the world, “Scoreboard.”

And I’ll be right there cheering him on, as one part student of narrative, and one part former Columbia Roughneck myself. Okay, maybe two parts.