Permian Panthers: Five Championships and a Question About Cost

Permian High School opened in nineteen fifty-nine, four years before the Odessa school district fully desegregated. It won its first Texas state football championship in nineteen sixty-five. It won again in nineteen seventy-two, nineteen eighty, and nineteen eighty-four. By the time Buzz Bissinger arrived in nineteen eighty-eight, Permian had statistically been the winningest high school football program in Texas over the previous two decades.

Ratliff Stadium, where the Panthers play their home games, holds nineteen thousand people in a city whose total population in the nineteen eighties was under a hundred thousand. The stadium was funded by a bond measure that the community voted for by a wide margin. On fall Friday nights, the stadium fills, and the town stops.

Bissinger's book complicated the celebration. It documented the educational spending disparities that sustained the football program: coaching salaries substantially higher than teacher salaries, sports medicine budgets that exceeded the entire English department allocation, SAT scores that had declined across the district without producing alarm. He also found that the school's success depended heavily on Black athletes who were living in a town that had, as recently as the year Permian opened, maintained legally segregated schools.

The Panthers have continued to compete since nineteen ninety. The book is still in print. The tension Bissinger identified, between the genuine community pride a sports program can generate and the institutional priorities that sustain it, has not resolved. Odessa is not unique in this. Bissinger chose it because it was a particularly vivid example of something that is, in one form or another, everywhere.