The State of High School Football in 2026
High school football is healthier than the obituaries suggest and sicker than the highlight reels admit. Having coached at small private schools and at the largest public classifications, I see the same handful of forces reshaping Friday nights everywhere — and most of the public conversation is about the wrong ones.
The transfer era has arrived at the high school level
What the portal did to college rosters, open-enrollment policies, school choice, and recruiting-adjacent "advising" are doing to high school programs. Players moving for the right reasons is nothing new and nothing wrong. What's new is the volume, and the ecosystem of adults encouraging fourteen-year-olds to think of themselves as free agents.
The cost isn't competitive balance — powerhouse schools always existed. The cost is developmental. The player who transfers at the first hint of a depth-chart battle never learns to win one, and winning a depth-chart battle is one of the most valuable things high school football teaches. I've coached transfers who flourished and transfers who carried the same problem to three different schools. The difference was never the school.
NIL trickle-down is mostly noise — with one real danger
A small number of states now allow high school NIL in some form, and the headlines make it sound like every quarterback has an agent. In reality, meaningful money touches a tiny fraction of players. For everyone else, NIL's effect at the high school level is psychological: it feeds the idea that the point of high school football is the next level. For roughly 93% of high school players, there is no next level — and that's not a tragedy, because the point was never college. The point was who the game makes you.
The real danger is the adults. When money enters a building, the adults who follow it are rarely the ones a sixteen-year-old needs more of.
Specialization is the quiet crisis
The trend nobody protests is the one doing the most damage: single-sport specialization and year-round 7-on-7. I want my skill players running track. I want my linemen wrestling. The multi-sport athlete arrives in August harder to injure, more coachable, and less burned out. The kid who has played nothing but football since age nine often arrives with a chronic soft-tissue problem and a chronic enthusiasm problem.
The best offseason football program in America is a wrestling season.
What's actually going right
It's not all warning lights. Coaching at the high school level is more sophisticated than it has ever been — the average coordinator today knows more football than many college staffs did twenty years ago. Player safety has improved dramatically: tackling instruction, contact limits, and heat protocols are unrecognizable from a generation ago, and the game is better for all of it. And in most of the country, Friday night remains the single strongest community institution a town has.
What coaches and parents should actually worry about
Not the portal. Not NIL. Worry about whether your program still develops — whether a kid can enter as a slow freshman and leave as a fast, confident senior who learned to do hard things. Programs that develop will survive every era. Programs that only collect talent were always renting their success.