bishop montgomery football
Bishop Montgomery Football and the Decline of Western Civilization (As Viewed from 30,000 Feet)
By the time the private-jet set touched down in Riyadh last week—fresh from Davos, COP 28, and a discreet stop in Davos again for good measure—news of Bishop Montgomery High’s latest gridiron triumph had already ping-ponged through the encrypted group-chats of arms dealers, crypto-evangelists, and one ex-pope who still can’t resist a good read-option. The Knights, a modest Catholic school outfit from Torrance, California, defeated Serra 28-21 under Friday-night lights that, regrettably, were powered by the same municipal grid keeping Elon Musk’s mini-sub prototypes on life support. Somewhere, a European energy minister wept into his espresso martini.
Why should anyone beyond the 405 care? Simple: Bishop Montgomery’s season is a perfect petri dish for all the pathologies currently colonizing Earth’s remaining habitable zip codes. Consider the roster: Tongan linebackers who learned to tackle by fending off rising sea levels, a quarterback whose family fled Shanghai’s lockdowns with nothing but a Roth IRA and a stack of NFTs, and a placekicker whose great-uncle once sold surface-to-air missiles to three different governments—simultaneously. They’re coached by a man who majored in theology, minored in NIL compliance, and spends his evenings doom-scrolling sea-level projections like they’re TikTok thirst traps. If that isn’t globalization in shoulder pads, what is?
The game itself was broadcast—via a dodgy YouTube stream—into a Nairobi sports bar where Somali pirates paused their Premier League reverie long enough to admire the Knights’ blitz packages. Those same packages, analysts note, bear a suspicious resemblance to the asymmetric tactics now favored by Wagner subcontractors in the Sahel. Coincidence? Perhaps. Or maybe teenage linebackers and mercenary generals both understand that chaos plus cardio equals results.
Back home, alumni boosters—wealthy enough to bankroll a small coup yet pious enough to insist the team prays before meals—have begun referring to the program as “soft power with a wing-T.” The metaphor isn’t entirely wrong. While State Department interns still fumble with PowerPoint decks on democracy promotion, Bishop Montgomery quietly exports a slicker, shinier version of American exceptionalism: crisp white helmets, drone-captured highlight reels, and a post-game prayer circle that somehow never mentions the $3.2 million NIL slush fund. The Vatican, for its part, issued a one-line press release: “We prefer soccer,” which is Latin for “We give up.”
Meanwhile, the global implications ripple outward like a concussion protocol no one really follows. Chinese streaming platforms bid for rights, hoping to splice ads for EV batteries between third-down conversions. European bookmakers offer prop bets on whether the star running back will flip to an SEC factory before signing an NIL deal with a Korean skincare conglomerate. In Moscow, state TV replays the Knights’ goal-line stand as evidence that decadent Americans still tackle better than they sanction. Everyone, it seems, sees what they need to see—except the teenagers actually playing, who mostly see calculus homework and the faint possibility of dental insurance.
By the fourth quarter, with the score knotted and the smog thick enough to chew, the cosmic joke becomes clear: a Catholic school in a drought-stricken suburb is accidentally running the most effective diplomatic program the United States still possesses. No white papers, no summits, no tedious ribbon-cuttings—just 48 minutes of highly choreographed violence followed by a mandatory Our Father. Somewhere in Brussels, a NATO deputy assistant secretary sighs, files another report on transatlantic cohesion, and books a red-eye to LAX. He’s heard the tailgates have Wagyu sliders now.
Final whistle. Serra’s sideline kneels in existential defeat; Bishop Montgomery’s students storm the field, blissfully unaware that their highlight reel just outperformed the last five Super Bowls in global engagement metrics. The world keeps spinning, sea levels keep rising, and somewhere an algorithm queues up next week’s matchup against Mater Dei—an even wealthier, even more morally ambiguous Catholic empire. Until then, the Knights will bask in the warm afterglow of victory, the comforting illusion that order can still be imposed by a well-executed screen pass. God bless America, or what’s left of it.
