Season 10 Episode 10: Dud Bowl II

The Kyoto National Bank is buying Polk High a new football scoreboard and wants to dedicate it to the school’s greatest football legend, which Al understands immediately to mean himself. Four touchdowns in one game has been his entire identity for ten seasons and here, finally, is a municipal plaque to prove it. The obstacle is that Marcy works at the bank, sits on the nominating committee, and tells the committee outright that Polk must have produced a better player than Al Bundy. They give her twenty-four hours to find one.

She finds Terry Bradshaw. The four-time Super Bowl winner appears as himself and turns out to have attended Polk for two months without ever suiting up or playing a game, which is enough for the committee and more than enough to destroy Al. The middle of the episode is Al, Bud and Jefferson going through yearbooks and then planning sabotage, and the dedication ceremony ends with the scoreboard in pieces.

What gives the half-hour more weight than its premise suggests is that it is the last time the series visits Polk High. The school had been the source of Al’s single good memory since the pilot, invoked in nearly every episode as the moment before everything went wrong, and the show closes the location out by having a genuine football hero turn up and take the honour away on a technicality. Kelly is the one who salvages it, going to Bradshaw directly, and he agrees to help her, a resolution the episode earns by making Bradshaw decent rather than smug, which is a choice the writers did not have to make.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, November 26, 1995 on FOX
• Season 10, Episode 10
• Overall episode 221 of the series
• Production code 10.10
• Written by Kim Weiskopf
• Directed by Gerry Cohen
• The title riffs on Budweiser’s stop-motion “Bud Bowl” Super Bowl campaign; despite the name it is not a plot sequel to season nine’s “Dud Bowl“
• The final episode to feature Polk High School

Guest Cast

• Terry Bradshaw as himself
• Jennifer Wade as the Cheerleader

Goodbye to Polk High

Polk High is the load-bearing wall of Al Bundy’s character. The four-touchdown game is referenced more often than any other fact about him, and the school functions throughout the series as the place where his life was still ahead of him. Retiring the location by having the scoreboard dedicated to someone else, and then blown up, is about as pointed a farewell as this show was capable of, and it is the only time the series lets Al lose that particular argument to an actual football player rather than to circumstance.

Bradshaw plays himself well, and the script’s best decision is the technicality. He did not beat Al on the field; he was simply at Polk for two months and never played, and the committee prefers his name anyway. That is a sharper insult than being outperformed would have been, because it means Al’s one real achievement counts for less than a famous stranger’s two months of attendance.

Kelly’s intervention is a rare straight note for the character in the late run. She goes to Bradshaw on her father’s behalf and he agrees to help, which means the episode resolves not through Al’s sabotage, that produces only wreckage, but through his daughter asking a favour. The show does not underline it, and Al never learns the full story, which is probably the right call.

Famous Quotes

• Al: “The Kyoto National Bank was buying a new football scoreboard for Polk High.” / Peg: “Oh, much better than a new library.” / Al: “That’s exactly what I said.”
• Al: “Well, it’s not official yet, but who else went to Polk scored four times in one game besides you?” To Peggy, who takes it in stride.
• Al: “Marcie and I have a lot in common. We both live on the same side of the street. Both married deadbeats… I eat chicken. She is one.” / Bud: “Dad, she’s had you arrested over 20 times and you call her ‘the little neighbor boy.’” / Al: “A pet name.”
• Marcy: “Before you brush off your good underwear, there is still one obstacle that lies between you and the eternal happiness you seek.” / Al: “You heard her, Peg. Get out.” / Marcy: “Not her, Al… Me.”
• Marcy: “I will not rest until someone else’s name is on that scoreboard.” The twenty-four-hour clock starts here.

Notes

• Bradshaw’s two months at Polk without suiting up is the committee’s entire justification. In reality he never attended school in Illinois at all; he went to Woodlawn High School in Shreveport, Louisiana, graduating in 1966.
• Bud’s count of Marcy having had Al arrested more than twenty times is the show’s own running tally.
• Kelly’s rant about Odie eating Garfield’s lasagna fits a long-running joke about her relationship with the comics page.
• Goof: the scoreboard is almost completely destroyed in the first shot of the explosion, then mostly intact with only the centre blown out in a later one: two props were evidently used.