A losing football coach gets one last shot at a small Texas college in this parody of inspirational football films. Lambeau Fields has spent his entire life as a football coach, and his entire life he has been a loser. Every team he's coached for has failed miserably, and every job he's held he's lost. Finally, he's encouraged by his friend and fellow coach, Freddie Wiseman, to take on one last job, in hopes of ending his career finally on a winning note. His wife isn't happy about the move, but they head to Texas, where Fields becomes the new head coach at Heartland State University. Unfortunately for him, as we come to expect in this genre, his team is currently a group of misfits who can't properly play the game. Some of his players: Lance Truman, the handsome quarterback for the team who can't hold on to the ball, Assel Tare, the most talented player on the team but also the most injury-prone, and Trotter, a super-masculine wide receiver who loves nothing more than his My Little Pony collectibles. Things start pretty rough for Fields as he tries to whip his team into shape-- including at home, where his wife starts spending a lot of time with an "exchange student" who is obviously her young lover. Many of these strategies are parodies of other sports films, including a send-up of a wrench-throwing sequence taken directly from the film Dodgeball. Eventually, they start coming together, especially once Fields recruits a girl-- Jizminder Featherfoot, an Indian soccer prodigy, a la the film Bend It Like Beckham-- to come pretend to be a guy and take the role of the team kicker. They even have a cliched locker-room singalong that makes the team magically bond together. They eventually make it to the Toilet Bowl, the big championship game in Texas, where they face The Lone Star Unbeatables, coached by Fields' friend Freddie: a team that, unsurprisingly, seems unbeatable. However, a series of bizarre plays and unexpected events in the second half, including having their mentally challenged mascot iPod call the plays in the fourth quarter, lead to their victory, and Fields is finally a winner-- although after the game Freddie runs him over with a bus out of anger.
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Best part of story, including ending:
It has its moments, mostly because Koechner is such a funny leading man, but too many of the scenes aren't clever, they're simply references to other films.
Best scene in story:
The halftime speech of the final game, in which the coach gets inspiration from various products laying around the locker room, is as clever as this film gets.
Opinion about the main character:
Lambeau is barely a character, he's mostly just a combination of existing movie cliches. Still, Koechner is an appealing leading comedic actor, so it could have been worse.
