The Joys and Sorrows of High School Football

I teach for a living. My hobby is P.A. and voice work. So I announce football games for my employer, a public high school. We're late in the season, and I've experienced enough greatness and wackiness this season to summarize it all in a couple of lists:

Top 5 Best Things about High School Football
5) Pre-Game Rituals: I love seeing how teams get themselves ready - drills, stretches, etc. (Euless Trinity's Haka chant is priceless.) Hype is so personal.
4) School Songs: There's a certain romance to the school song before the game and, especially, afterward. If you want to see real emotion, watch the losing team in a hardfought playoff game during the postgame alma mater.
3) Drum Lines: Seems like even schools with relatively weak bands have at least decent drum lines. And drum cadences in the stands somehow never get old.
2) Big 3rd and 4th Down situations: There nothing quite like a tight game between good teams where you've got a critical 3rd or 4th down--both sides cheering in anticipation.
1) Big Plays, especially scoring plays: What makes HS football unique is the two-side atmosphere you get at the stadium. When a team gets a big scoring play, you hear the defined roar of one side, and the other side falls silent. I love it, especially when it's a big rivalry game.

Top 5 WHIPS about High School Football
5) The Spread Offense: I don't mind the spread as an offense, but it's based on having a good athlete at QB. Too many teams throw a mediocre athlete out there in the spread, and they're just awful. I'd rather see the discipline of an option attack instead.
4) Gary Glitter's Rock & Roll, Part II, otherwise known as "The 'Hey' Song": Forget the fact that GG is a failed musician and convicted of child pornography. This is sooooo overplayed by seemingly every band out there. And every school thinks THEY somehow "invented" it. And every school chants, "Hey! Go (insert mascot here)!" Then when the opposing band plays it, they STILL chant their mascot, acting like they're doing something cool and unique.
3) Halftime: It's bad enough that bands drag all their junk on the field and take so much time to perform their full contest shows. Drill teams now add more to this whip than ever before. The current drill team trend is to perform TWO routines: one for their field entrance, the other as their featured routine. Add to that the announcer, who's usually a parent--or worse, a student--stammering through every award the girls have won, the officers, and the girls of the week, and it is a festival of pain.
3a) Homecoming Halftime: I'm all for Homecoming - bring the alumni back, crown a King & Queen. Great. But do we need a 20-foot red carpet? Do we need a balloon arch? Do we need some kind of military honor guard? (Don't military personnel have more pressing concerns?) Do we need cars or horse-drawn carriages on the field or the track? Do we need to get a local TV news personality to emcee the Homecoming Coronation at the local well-to-do school?
2) Inflatable Run-Throughs: Seems like every school's booster club now drags out yards of vinyl connected to a portable air compressor so that their team can run through a helmet, or a tunnel, or an animal head, or a pirate ship, or whatever. I much prefer the cheerleader-made paper sign. Leave the giant helmets to the pros.
1) Flag Runners/Spirit Groups: They have these in college, too, and it's much cooler. In high school, it's overkill to have ___ - H - S flags (plus others) leading the team onto the field before the game and running up and down the sidelines after a score. The worst offenders: Euless Trinity, who run T-R-I-N-I-T-Y incessantly. At most schools, there's always someone who's a straggler, so you see M - H - ... S, for instance. Add spirit group pushups to the mix here. Just watch the highlights on your local news, because the cameramen LOVE this stuff. Let me get this straight...a dozen non-athletes doing 7 POORLY-performed pushups (trust me, THEY'RE TERRIBLE) is supposed to get the team fired up? Uh-huh. Three words: ANYTHING FOR ATTENTION. Johnny's not in a sport or in band, but he wants to get on the field, and his mom wants to see him there. So he joins the "spirit group." I'd much rather see those students dressed or even painted in school colors IN THE STANDS, instead of adding more arbitrary crowd to the sidelines.