So here we are.  Episode 3 of the season.  When we last left Dillon, the Lions were just starting to come back together, while Tammi faced some trouble over in West Dillon from Joe and the boosters.  This episode was about very little.  Mainly Coach is facing a severe money shortage.  You see he burned the teams uniforms last week but did so without thinking about how they were going to get new ones.  Somewhere in between last week and this week he ordered new ones from UnderArmor.  The UnderArmor salesman pays him a personal visit, flying all the way from Baltimore(?) to ask Coach for the money because Coach helped launch UnderArmor?  Is this really the way we had to work this UnderArmor promotion into the show?  Is it at all realistic that a major clothing retailer just happened to cut Coach Taylor a break on new uniforms because he was there when they started (which, huh? no he was not)?  The whole thing is odd.  He couldn’t have just been a local salesman who is proudly selling UnderArmor goods?  He really had to be actually from the company’s HQ?  This is ridiculous.

Anyway Coach pays him $3000 of the cost of the uniforms, out of his own personal checking account.  But the Taylor’s don’t have $3000 in their checking account!  Ruh roh.  Also the team went out fundraising and Coach also gave money to people to give to the team to make them feel like they were actually raising money because no one in East Dillon cares about football.  We also learn that apparently because of the quitting incident the East Dillon principal doesn’t like Coach and Coach wasn’t supposed to take this job anyway and he doesn’t really want a football team and now he get’s made fun of at school board meetings.  These are adults.  So the whole team is in jeopardy.

Because no one cares about football like 3 blocks away from the people who are total lunatics about football, Coach can’t raise any money at all even though he spends the entire episode trying.

Also this week there is a weird story line about Julie not wanting to go to church and Tammi wanting her to that literally lasts the whole episode.  Speaking of Julie, there’s a Saracen breakup on the horizon when crazy artist who Saracen is interning for tells her she’s holding him back.  Julie remains adorable.

Landry is moved to punter, basically to facilitate a scene in which the girl he developed a crush on last season shows up at the football field for some reason with a bunch of kids (it’s never said who’s kids they are) and shows Landry how to punt properly.  She tells him she knows how because her dad used to play football and almost went pro but hates it now.  I smell mystery.

Riggins is now helping out the team and mostly working with the kid who got moved to East Dillon last week.  We discover he lives at a farm and is using football as his way out.  Coach promises to help him get a scholarship.  Anyway Riggins is disturbed by the teenage girl that is crushing on him and attempts to set her up with that kid.  But she just gets all mad cause basically she wants to be all up on Riggins.  And he’s all like you’re pretty much a child, and also I was nailing Lyla last year (he does not say any of this but at least the first part it’s clear he is thinking).  Speaking of, can we have Lyla come home for Thanksgiving or something?  I miss her.  And Tyra of course.

The only really big thing that happens this week is that Buddy finally gets fed up with Joe and the rest of the Boosters, saying this isn’t the old Panthers that he loved and he cannot be a part of it anymore.  The last straw for him was when they were talking about taking down Tammi.  Buddy is probably one of the best characters on television right now.

Oh also Juvie is all “fuck whitey” now. So he hates coach and new kid.  Cause they’re white.  So the Lions play their second game and they get killed, but they score one touchdown.  Because this is FNL land, things don’t always have magical happy endings, they have to be earned.

Overall this wasn’t the best episode ever but really only because there was so little actually going on.  I felt like nothing really moved further plot wise or even character wise.  They did however tone way down on East Dillon=Compton, although Juvie tells Transfer (that’ll be his name for a while, it’s actually Luke though) that “he’s a long way from home”, although obviously he’s zoned for the same school so he’s not actually that far from home and they’re both from the same community which is apparently made up of projects and farms.  Also they insist on playing rap over the scenes of the Lions practicing to enforce the “urban” vibe.  We’re in rural Texas.  This is unnecessary.  But it is a huge improvement over the past two weeks worth of stereotypical horribleness.  Keep this up FNL.

Until next week’s episode Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose.