For Texans, the phrase “Friday night lights” signals the end of a workweek and conjures up flashes of teenage high-school football players, marching bands, and cheerleaders. But historically, and by that we mean much of the twentieth century, it is a phrase synonymous with only white school players playing on Fridays. Black kids would take the gridiron earlier in the week, on a Wednesday or a Thursday.
Sportsbooks certainly hit a bit of a snooze, with UIL (University Interscholastic League) coming to recognize, not until 2006, what few records of all-black school competitions existed under the PVIL banner (Prairie View Interscholastic League). PVIL, which was founded in 1920, served the same mission as UIL–governing high school athletic, academic, and music competitions–for black kids. Taking a page from Michael Hurd’s Thursday Night Lights: The Story of Black High School Football in Texas, he would write, “They would not only get hand-me-down uniforms and equipment from white schools, but even some of the jock straps. Used jock straps, imagine that!”
This went on until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed school segregation. ‘Integration’ didn’t mean a merger; it meant consequences that ultimately saw all of PVIL, which once boasted 500 schools at its peak, close down by the end of the 1970 spring semester, consequences that erased an unheralded legacy of football greatness to a great extent. Gone were the histories of passionate rivalries that dominated the 40s through the 60s; gone were the annual Thanksgiving Day games between Wheatley and Yates that once drew crowds up to 40,000 fans at Jeppesen Stadium. 3x Super Bowl champion and Houston Worthing’s Cliff Branch would recall, “Our league was special, but the perception was that the UIL was better. We had a league of our own. I don’t think, back then, we realized what a special league we had, but we did. We didn’t need integration. It was special football and I’m glad I was part of it.” That’s right, Bubba.
The league was never really embraced by the media outlets, and photographs, too, were hard to come by. But here’s an attempt by a Texan faithful, Director Mark Burns, to recapture some lost history. A new documentary is on the horizon, and a soft release was done on Saturday. Burns dropped an X post highlighting a sun‑soaked road trip to Key Largo with NFL scribe John McClain, Rob Lynch, and Scott Nethery to chat with the Hall of Famer Jimmy Johnson for a project dubbed The PVIL Story. Take a look:
Just returned from a fun road trip to Key Largo w @McClain_on_NFL, Rob Lynch & Scott Nethery to interview @JimmyJohnson for a new documentary project that I’m working on… “The PVIL Story”. More to come on this very soon. What a great interview & gentleman HOF Coach Johnson is! pic.twitter.com/gYba8y1PP3
— Mark Burns (@MarkBurns77) June 13, 2025
The director seemed to have stopped at Johnson’s “Big Chill” restaurant, which is located at Mile Marker 104, Bayside. Johnson reposted the tweet with a message of his own: “Going to be an outstanding documentary!”
But that’s not the only project Johnson has dabbled in. Netflix’s America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys will drop on Netflix August 19, 2025. It is a 10‑episode NFL Films gem with Skydance Sports and the Way brothers at the helm. It will chronicle Jerry Jones buying the Cowboys in 1989, Jimmy Johnson molding them into champs, and voices like Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin, Emmitt Smith, and Deion Sanders painting the ’90s glory. America’s Team is a wild, deep dive into the heart of the Dallas Cowboys and what really went down behind closed doors. Big risks. Big egos. Bigger dreams. And as for Jimmy Johnson, the man is still chasing his score!
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