It Kills Me to Say This but Season 2 of Last Chance U is A Dud

On July 21st, Netflix released the second season of its wildly popular football documentary Last Chance U. I’m a huge football guy, and I always have been since I started playing when I was a little kid. I’m a sucker for any and all football movies or documentaries, so naturally I consider anything that falls under that umbrella to be must watch TV. But as a true football guy, I know in my heart of hearts that football season doesn’t really begin until August 1st. In my mind, the beginning of August is when the actual preseason for football teams at every level officially gets under way, and I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around football until then. With all that being said, I always respect the last week and a half of July, and abstain from all football activity until the month ends.
I absolutely loved the first season of Last Chance U, so I was fuckin pumped when I saw that they released the second season of the show a little bit earlier than normal in July. I wanted to watch it so badly, but I thought if I can’t commit to my own football guy beliefs, why should anyone else? I waited 11 whole days before digging in to season 2 of Last Chance U, and I just finished the 8-episode season yesterday.
It pains me to say this, but season 2 of Last Chance U was a total dud.
Believe me, I really wish I didn’t feel this way. When I watched the first season of the show last Summer, it was the perfect lead in to football season. It was released right at the beginning of August, and I finished watching it just as the annual HBO football documentary Hard Knocks was released. The combination of Last Chance U and Hard Knocks was the perfect medicine for my football fever. I was more hyped for football season than I’d ever been before in my entire life, and I was hoping that season 2 of this show would be able to recreate the feelings it gave me last Summer. Unfortunately, season 2 of Last Chance U didn’t even come close to making me feel the way it used to.
It tried hard, but this season of the show was just flat out unentertaining. There’s a lot that I didn’t like about this season, but I think its biggest weakness is that the creators of the show tried too hard to make it like season 1. It was almost like they took the exact same filmmaking formula that they used last year, and reimplemented it again with a couple of new faces thrown in. That might’ve worked if they were dealing with the same cast of interesting players from last season, but obviously that was not the case this year.
The players on the team this year were just boring. There were no over-the-top, entertaining personalities like Ronald Ollie, and there were no real position battles on the team like there were with the quarterbacks John Franklin III and Wyatt Roberts. Instead, this season featured lots of nonsense screaming from head coach Buddy Stephens, and an unusual amount of camera time for the moody defensive linemen.
At the beginning of the season, there’s a scene where Buddy Stephens is sitting in his car reflecting on his behavior in season 1. He talks about how embarrassed he was for the profane language he used and the way he treated his players and coaching staff on the sidelines. He takes a vow that he’ll clean up his act for this season of the show, and that ends up lasting for about a whole 5 minutes. They show him being level-headed and accountable in a single scene from practice, and after that he goes right back to his good ol’ dickhead ways.
Screaming at players, coaches, and even the camera crew at times, Buddy Stephens makes an absolute fool of himself in this season. I’ve dealt with my fair share of good and bad coaches in life, and never have I seen a coach as bad as Buddy Stephens. You’d think that a guy working at a school like EMCC would be a little more conscious of the types of personalities he’s dealing with on his team, but shockingly Buddy isn’t. He screams his head off and gets in the face of every player and coach each time they make a mistake, and it becomes clear that both the players and coaches resent him. It all culminates in the last episode of the season when he blows up in the face of his long-time offensive coordinator, and looks like a bigger jerk than he ever has in either season of the show.
At the end of the season they show a montage of where each player and coach decides to take their careers next, and it’s no surprise to see that more than half of his coaching staff ends up leaving him behind at EMCC.
And on top of all the irritation that Buddy Stephens provides this season, there’s the defensive line. The supposed star of the d-line, Kam Carter, was easily the most hateable player on the team this season. He was a big, misunderstood kid that had no real friends on the team and didn’t get along with any of his coaches. He was unmotivated in practices and constantly shot himself in the foot in every player/coach interaction he had, and for whatever reason, the creators of the show decided that he deserved screen time in every single episode. I would’ve been fine with them touching on Kam a few times throughout the season, but after seeing scene after scene of him being a gigantic bitch, I got tired of him pretty quickly.
The rest of the d-line was as unentertaining as the rest of the team, but it still always felt like they were getting the most screen time. The d-line scenes became so painful to watch that I basically ended up tuning them all out by the end of the season.
Even the scenes with the most likeable person on the show, academic counselor Brittany Wagner, felt trite and repetitive a lot of the time. Luckily for her, by the end of the show she decides to leave EMCC and get out of that burning hellhole while she still can.
The best news to come out of this entire season is that the creators of Last Chance U are considering taking the show to another college next year. Of course Buddy Stephens has already come out saying that he thinks they should come back to EMCC to capture the remainder of a story that’s been left untold, but I’m hoping and praying that the creators are as fed up with him as I am.
Personally, I don’t care too much about whether or not they return to EMCC. I feel pretty confident that I’ll never watch this show again, as long as something like Hard Knocks is still around. I’m realizing now that it’s a fucking miracle that Hard Knocks is able to deliver the same quality of football entertainment from year to year, and that this football documentary stuff isn’t as easy as it seems. The first episode of Hard Knocks came out yesterday, and that episode alone was ten times better than the entirety of this season of Last Chance U.
It can be tough to satiate football fever for a guy like me, but hopefully with enough late nights spent watching Hard Knocks and playing Madden, I’ll be able to get back to that football craze I felt last Summer.
