With football practices starting next week, now would be as good a time for fans to look through Dave Campbell’s Texas Football Magazine.
printed every year since 1960, over the decades it has been the dubbed, “The Bible of Texas Football.”
No other publication does the exhaustive work of trying to preview all of the more than 1,500 high school and private school football teams in the state at once.
It also previews Texas college and pro teams as well as recruiting, but for a lot of communities, seeing their high school and player’s names in print as part of the definitive preview of Texas High School football is the big kicker.
Also parts of it are the little blurbs written about every team, which everyone wishes were longer or more in depth.
Some are longer than others, especially those from renowned programs and bigger schools that get regular regional coverage.
Some of it can lie with the coaches, who have to fill out and return questionnaires during a busy spring season while also dealing with athletic director duties. A lot of stuff can change from when that questionnaire was sent back in terms of kids moving in or out of the district as well as a different coach leading the team that fall.
Some of it can be reflected back to the Texas Football staffers, who probably have to write hundreds of previews at once with little information to go on some times.
All of this is to say, as highly regarded as “The Bible of Texas Football” is, fans cannot always take the high school previews to heart.
Besides the blurbs and key players mentioned, there are pre-season state rankings and district predictions.
Again, with little to go on for staffers for some districts and hundreds to predict, most are surface level guesses.
It’s not surprising in that sense Bowie is picked to finish last in the 3-3A division I district.
Coming off a 1-9 record last year, with Coach Tyler Price taking over and most of the team’s leading offensive skill players graduated from last year, this season from the outside will look like a rebuild of sorts.
Some of it might prove to be overblown since Price seems committed to turn around a program he grew up in and the team returning many key role players and lineman on both sides of the ball.

To read the full story, pick up a copy of the mid-week edition of the Bowie News.