Rush Propst is back in Netflix's 'Titletown High,' an update on an old classic

Editor’s note: Spoilers ahead. 

At the end of Episode 4 of the new Netflix series Titletown High, out today, the head football coach at Valdosta High School calls his quarterback into a meeting. The player’s mother enters the room seconds later.

The Wildcats have won two games in a row without giving up a point to move to 3-3 on the season. A string of wins, the coach knows, will be enough to push the team into the playoffs — maybe even with home-field advantage.

“Now we know going forward where you are,” the coach begins. “You’re the guy that’s either going to lead us (to) being successful or not being successful. You know, I think you’ve persevered through some things, and I think that’s a good thing.

“What I’m here to talk to you about, and why I wanted your mama to hear this, is that I am concerned, with the type of kid you are, with this girlfriend situation. And, mom, it’s not a good situation.

“You cannot be my quarterback and continue down this path.”

The episode ends with the quarterback staring blankly.

It is unclear whether Amari Jones, the charismatic and quickly maturing junior, knows how bizarre this conversation really is. The head coach speaking to him is Rush Propst, who rose to fame while leading Hoover High and appearing on the MTV hit Two-A-Days 15 years ago.

Propst would leave that job, and the dynasty he built, amid the revelation that he **had an entire second family.** (He was also accused of having an affair with an administrator who was involved in changing players’ grades; he’s denied that.)

Maybe Propst has learned from experience that relationships can be a distraction. Or maybe it’s just old-school football-man manipulation. You can’t ever really tell, which is how it generally goes with Propst, who manages to be both remarkably direct while forever appearing to have a secret he might but probably will not share.

At heart, Titletown High is in so many ways a follow-up to Two-A-Days. It gives executive producer Jason Sciavicco a chance to revisit the project that propelled his career at age 24 and made Propst the most famous high school coach in the country. Here, 15 years later, is a study in how time changed it all: reality television, high school kids, a cantankerous football coach.

Whether it can replicate the success — Two-A-Days was at one point MTV’s most popular show and helped spawn a wave of embedded-with-the-team documentary series — is impossible to guess. The formula feels well-worn at this point (Netflix has had Last Chance U seasons in previous summers) and it’s hardly novel to have high school kids express themselves on video; they’re filming themselves a lot of the time, anyway.

But if you give the show a chance — just get past the initial wave of remembering how cloying it can be to be in high school — you’ll find a warm, big-hearted look at growing up today. And of playing football in yet another place where football matters too much to the adults who generally manage to cause most of the problems.

Sciavicco, who would go on to produce a searing look at youth football called Friday Night Tykes and then embed for seasons with Notre Dame and Florida State, always had the idea of catching up with Propst in the back of his mind. Then Propst landed at the winningest high school program in the country.

“Seemed like the right time,” Sciavicco says.

The Wildcats have won 24 Georgia state titles but only one this century and while all the pressure of being a dominant program exists in town, the elements that actually make up such a program are, according to Propst, lacking. He puts the team through a fevered preseason — he runs his offenses at breakneck pace — while simultaneously telling his players outright that 1) the program is broken and 2) nevertheless, their goal should be a state title.

Titletown High is ultimately a show about the kids, though. One of them, quarterback Jake Garcia, is the quintessential grown-up-too-fast elite athlete: A USC-commit (who ultimately signed with Miami), he has moved to town because California canceled football due to Covid-19. He’s eventually ruled ineligible and leaves the team.

Grayson Leavy, meanwhile, is a sophomore defensive end who vacillates between two girls … but also between profound realizations and ridiculous justifications as he figures himself out.

Jones’ mother encourages him to focus on football and school and not date, yet he can’t resist Morgan Miller, a fiercely passionate classmate determined to draw him out from the shelter of books and the huddle.

Sciavicco gives us an immersive look at life for the students as the coronavirus pandemic swirls. They live so much of it on their phones, a source of frustration for Propst. “The thing they’ve lost is that ability to be one-on-one, that personal interaction, because they don’t have to do it,” he tells me. “You sit down with them, and you have to dig things out of them.”

Yet they hardly shy from having intimate conversations in front of the camera. “They’re remarkably open, and they adjust to it so quickly,” Sciavicco says.

Propst remains an anti-Ted Lasso character. Sure, he wears a visor, deploys a  disarming Southern drawl and can — will — talk to anyone. He’s more slight now — he was bed-ridden and had suicidal thoughts while fighting cancer a few years after leaving Hoover — and his hair has gone white. He looks less bombastic, more grandfatherly, and, though he tells me that he regrets how brash and surly he seemed in Two-A-Days, he is much the same coach on film now, constantly belittling and challenging his players in hopes that they will rise to his challenges.

They mostly do, as they usually have for him, and Valdosta appears to be on the cusp of regaining its rightful place in Georgia high school football. Among many of his players, Propst is a revered figure; they gather at his house to eat and study, and he speaks proudly of the players headed to college on scholarship.

Then, in the final minutes of the show, it all crumbles. A man named Nub Nelson, who, yes, lost his arm when he was younger, has hovered over the story for most of the show. The executive director of the Wildcats booster group, he clashes with Propst and a recording he made of the coach discussing a slush fund to pay recruits becomes public.

Now Propst is out of football again, and Valdosta is, for the first time in the school’s history, ineligible for the playoffs. Propst has moved back to Alabama, not far from where he was raised, and is focused on being a dad.

“I’ve spent so much time raising up other kids,” he says, “that maybe my kids have been cheated a little bit.”

He reckons he’ll coach again someday, and says that the whole story about what happened at Valdosta will come out eventually. “It has always taken time for the truth to come out,” he says.

The truth about his other family at Hoover is this: He eventually divorced his first wife, Tammy, to marry his girlfriend Stefnie. She’s the other woman present for the meeting where Amari is told he needs to breakup with Morgan.

They have three kids, all born while Propst was at Hoover and hiding his relationship; the oldest is a junior in high school. A wide receiver, like his dad was. In one scene of Titletown High’s last episode, Propst has to tell them that his world, and therefore theirs, has been upended by scandal again. Sciavicco has made a career out of filming raw moments like this and even he felt like he was intruding on that moment.

I ask Propst why controversy has followed him, and he says it’s a mix of his success, his personality and his mistakes. He talks about learning from the past, about having Sciavicco film almost every second of his life and condense it into a cohesive, coherent narrative. He hasn’t seen Titletown High yet. He’s anxious to know what others will think. He’s anxious to know what he will think.

“Jason knows me better than I do,” he says. “But I remember a time, at Hoover, when we’d been to four state title games in a row, won three of four, and we’re on the bus back and, no lie, we had a staff meeting before we even went out to celebrate. We had to plan what to do next.

“I don’t think that’s who I am now. But, that monster’s still flourishing at Hoover, so, I don’t know.”