It doesn’t take long for Gordon Nehls, the narrator and lead character of Fourth Down in Texas, to get across how much he loves high school football. As the novel begins, the longtime football coach is standing in one of the team entrance tunnels at AT&T Stadium, minutes before the start of a playoff game. He looks at the players, including his oldest son, and remembers how these moments felt as a player. "This stadium will be rocking soon, and the players standing next to me are the reason why. They’re shoulder-to-shoulder, internally pacing, waiting to take the field. They’re both thrilled and terrified, the unforgettable combination of being simultaneously fired up and scared shitless that I remember from the last time I put on shoulder pads in high school. Even then, as a teenager who rarely thought farther ahead than my next Whataburger order, I thought about becoming a coach." It’s fair to say that Nehls is a conglomeration of the coaches I've known ov