‘Clear eyes, full heart’: the unlikely championship that launched Tim Walz

The 2024 US presidential election may come down to a high school football coach whose run to an improbable state title 25 years ago was straight out of Friday Night Lights

We're hiring another football coach," Mankato West high school principal John Barnett told Scarlets head football coach Rick Sutton after interviewing Tim Walz about a geography teaching position. You're definitely gonna want to talk to him."

This was back in the spring of 1997, when Walz was a 30-something national guardsman relocating to Minnesota from Nebraska so his wife could be closer to her family. So Sutton arranged a second informal interview at his house, one that would ultimately decide whether Walz's $25,000-a-year teaching gig would come with a $2,500 bonus for working with the football team. I knew very, very early on in our conversation that this was a guy that I definitely wanted on my staff," Sutton recalls of Walz, who took the job.