Power Ranking the Top 5 Football Movies in Recent Memory

Sports movies are sort of a strange phenomenon. We watch sports because, whether we have a dog in the fight or we just enjoy the action, we’re invested in the game. We care about a winner. On the other hand, we watch movies because we’re invested in characters.

Sure, we sometimes do the reverse, and enjoy sports because we’re invested in characters. Countless people who didn’t care about hockey or basketball cheered Ray Bourque to his first Stanley Cup or rooted with glee as LeBron choked away the Finals.

But we never enjoy movies because we’re invested in the game on screen. Rocky wasn’t about boxing; it was about a person. You don’t get goosebumps at the end because of two heavyweights slugging it out; you get goosebumps because the guy you were rooting for finally came out ahead. The sweet science got personified.

And it seems the more “team” a sport is, the more difficult a good movie about it becomes. Look at any “top sports movies of all time” list and you’ll notice that, with the exception of Hoosiers, it’s comprised mostly of movies based on individual sports. Baseball movies might be the one counter argument. But as we’ve learned in the last decade with Sabermetrics, baseball is really an individual game played simultaneously with eight other guys. You can focus on just a pitcher or a hitter in the bottom of the ninth; their heroics act in isolation (strikeout or homerun).

That individual lens is tough to translate to football. Twenty-one other guys are running around the field; the focus on your hero gets a little diluted. So we’ve had a dearth of good football movies, especially since the 70’s, that focus on football. The modern versions sell the sport’s sex and violence, or manufacture lame humor, rather than zeroing in on the grit of the game.

Here are my top five modern football movies released after 1990. These are movies about "the game of football." I had considered leaving the #1 spot blank as I think Hollywood has yet to give football it’s gold-standard.

(Above image courtesy of IMDB. Remaining images courtesy of WikiCommons.)

The Mentions

I am purposely not calling these honorable or dishonorable mentions. They’re just mentions. They exist.

We Are Marshall: A story that needed to be told and left behind for perpetuity’s sake. It just needed to be told better.

Invincible: See above.

The Blind Side: This was a nice movie. I just couldn’t get past Quinton Aaron’s acting. I realize the part was difficulat to cast, but his feeble lines, like Tiny Tim in a 300-pound body, really killed the movie for me, especially when juxtaposed next to Bullock’s sassy pants.

Friday Night Lights: A good movie. But we're leaving it off the top five because it was based on a book and is now part of a sprawling TV series. We're looking for films that stand on their own.

Leatherheads: Funny at times, but humor is not what comes to mind when I think of football. It was a playful lens to examine the past, but not true to the game.

The Longest Yard (remake): Just apologize Adam Sandler. Now.

The Replacements: The only thing redeeming about this movie is Reeves’ name: Shane Falco. Who comes up with his character’s names? Neo, Johnny Utah, Officer Jack Traven…

Necessary Roughness: This movie was released because you (barely) see Kathy Ireland in the shower. Otherwise this would never have made it off the lot.

Jerry McGuire: This is no more a football movie than The Notebook was about a notebook. This was a love story.

Rudy

I have seen this movie about twenty times and will happily admit that the final scene still makes me pretend like I’m coughing and clearing my throat. Just a powerful culmination of a heart-wrenching movie. If we reordered this list as “Favorite Movies Involving Football Somehow,” it’d be at the top.

The reason I don’t have Rudy up there is because, if you step back, it’s not exactly a football movie. Yes, the plot revolves around him making the Notre Dame football team and he gets knocked around in practice, but, in essence, football is a backdrop to perseverance. I’m not saying it isn’t a football movie, but I’m also saying it isn’t quite a football movie. You wouldn’t call The Pursuit of Happiness a movie about job-hunting. You’d call it a movie about perseverance.

Perseverance is certainly a core aspect to football; and that’s why I wouldn’t lump it the same “football as a backdrop theme” category as Jerry McGuire. But it is worth noting that Rudy doesn’t actually play a down of Notre Dame football until the last scene of the movie. The character of Rudy comes first, the game of football comes second.

(Fun fact: That scene where the team lays their jerseys on Dan Devine’s desk to protest Rudy not making the team never happened. Apparently Levine, who is a nice guy and actually agreed to be vilified in the movie, was pretty pissed about Hollywood taking that licence. Even Joe Montana, who was on the team that year, thought it was way too over the top.)

Remember the Titans

I can’t believe a Disney movie is up here. Yes, this is a movie about football that doesn’t have swearing. And the clichéd arc of the white kid working past his bigotry to become friends with the black kid is tiresome in its predictability.

But Denzel, in his patented intensity, makes this movie happen, nailing the part of the thoughtful but hard-nosed football coach. Sort of the antithesis to Varsity Blues’ Coach Kilmer.

The football scenes are real enough. And perhaps this was an area that Disney helped make better, believe it or not. Most football plays are not that violent. When a tailback gets brought down, it’s usually more of a juke-grab-shimmy-wrap-wriggle-hit-fall, not a reenactment of someone being pulverized by a locomotive. So with Disney’s foot on the violence brake, it probably ended up making the scenes more realistic, as strange as that sounds.

Plus, now any time a quarterback grows out his hair we get to automatically call him Sunshine.

Varsity Blues

The acting was a little tough to get through at times, but all and all, this was an entertaining movie that did a pretty good job capturing ultra-competitive high school football. This was MTV’s version of Friday Night Lights.

Sure, some characters were more caricatures, Coach Bud Kilmer especially, but the film did drive home 1) the importance of football to small rural communities and 2) how much it consumes these high schoolers’ lives.

Do I think those sociological aspects were at the core of MTV Films making this film? Of course not. Whip cream bikinis, blasting shotguns out of trucks, hot teachers turning out to be strippers and stealing cop cars wearing nothing but a cowboy hat was probably more the focus.

But they did capture pieces of a very legitimate cross-section of American culture and its very real love for the game of football. 

Any Given Sunday

I would have put this at the top of the list except for two reasons.

1) The football scenes are too much. It looked like they were trying to reenact the videogame NFL Blitz. At one point a guy gets hit so hard that his eye comes flying out of the socket. Let me say that again: a guy’s eye comes flying out of the socket. (And then he somehow hobbles off the field as if the impact to his head wasn’t quite enough to knock him out, only enough to make his eye shoot out of the socket.)

2) They wanted you to care about too many characters and in the end, you end up caring about none of them. Do I care about the quarterback battle? The aging linebacker with the drug problem? Ethics to prevail over the doctors? A fair shake for the tailback and wide receiver? Justice for the terrible owner? Redemption for the coach?

All of them are good plotlines; they just invested too much drama, too many scenes off the field where we’re supposed to empathize. And in the end they all sort of cancelled each other out: everyone was screwed.

Maybe that’s the message about football; this dog eat dog world just leaves everyone by the wayside. But it just missed the mark amide a sea of gameplay theatrics and humbling pans around the locker room.

Also, I’ll be honest. I’m a sucker for a good movie speech, but Pacino’s “Game of Inches” spiel didn’t really do it for me. Some goosebumps, not a full arm though.

The Program

I’ll be the first to say it: the dueling love stories are hard to get past. Not only were either clichéd and predictable, but no one except Halle Barry pulled off an ounce of genuine chemistry. There is a reason Omar Epps retired from acting and took over the Steelers head-coaching job.

But looking past those two asterisks, this was, to date, our most comprehensive movie on the modern game of football. (Yes, I just made it sound like six volume series from the Harvard sociology department. That’s right, I went there.) The Program had many of the same plot arcs as Any Given Sunday, but they didn’t worry about you over-caring, which perhaps is 1) crappy filmmaking or 2) more to the point.

You have the positional battles, and the psychotic coach, and the drugs, and the parties, and the hazing, and the sex, and the sexual violence, and the on-field violence, and the off-field violence and the pure animal competition of the game—and they provide just enough of a human flavor to make it real, but not distracting from the fact that this is a movie about football. It’s a brutal game. Take it or leave it.

As an added bonus, I now can’t listen to Welcome to the Jungle without seeing Mac pile drive some dummy tailback. I also can’t make a dinner reservation without wanting to demand a Place at the table!! from the hostess.

[Follow Caleb on Twitter or Bleacher Report if you want more musings. He also wrote a book called The St George's Angling Club, which you can buy on Amazon.]