A Football Story, set in football-crazed Dallas, Texas, is an action-filled drama told with dark humor. The story begins on Christmas Eve, 1988, with Burl Ives singing “Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas” and immediately flashes back six weeks as Matt Story, a young, undermotivated NCAA infractions officer, accompanies his boss, Dick Brotherman, to view a routine post-probation compliance signing at a football powerhouse, Texas Methodist University.

Then suddenly, the TMU star African American fullback Wylie Sams gives a TV interview accusing the school of continuing to pay its players despite their probation restrictions. Infractions officer Brotherman is quickly forced off the case by money in the bank Arthur Godine, TMU’s wealthy, ex-senator board of governors chairman, and leaves Matt in charge of the NCAA investigation.

Despite an attractive job offer from Godine and harassment from Godine’s two in-house flunkies, Flipper Smalls, the ugliest man alive, and Evelyn Rouse, the biggest bitch on the planet, Matt, with the help of Morgan Caulder, the TMU president’s daughter, an African American hooker, Gerry Johnson, and Wylie Sams’ mother, Celia, and his sister, Prissy, gets the evidence he needs to make his case, just when his chief witness, the drug-addicted fullback, Sams, is resupplied with narcotics by Godine’s crew, overdoses, crashes, and dies.

Eventually, with the help of TMU’s All American running back, Taylor Dobie, Matt proves his case and wins Morgan’s love and the respect of the people who count in his life.

As a light snow falls on Christmas Eve, Flipper and Evelyn are hauled off to jail by the Dallas police while William, Godine’s jack of all trades manservant, heads their long black Cadillac toward hearth and home, as Gene Autry sings “Hop in bed and cover up your head, because Santa Claus comes tonight.”

The rich and powerful board chairman drives safely away as the snow comes to a halt. No white Christmas again this year, it appears. But, after all, this is Dallas.