High school football is back, which is a great thing. Mostly.

The number of things that aren't great about it are increasing, and increasingly troubling, but let's start out by looking on the bright side, because that's still the dominant side of the equation.

It's great that high school football is back because, first and foremost, high school football has an impact larger than the final score.

High school football is not just about football. It brings together students who might not otherwise interact, be they on the team, in the band, on the pep squad or in the stands. And while the idea that sports builds character may be subject to debate — you can make a strong case for the opposing truism, that it actually reveals character — it is nonetheless true that there are plenty of former players out there who stay close to their coaches long after their high school days, and will readily credit them as being huge influences in their lives.

High school football is great because it involves communities with their schools. This might not be as true in parts of Southern California as it is in places like the San Joaquin Valley or (of course) Texas — where games are a focal point of life and can draw crowds in excess of a town's population — but it does happen, and anything that brings a positive focus on schools and students and faculty is a good thing.

And, of course, high school football is generally great if you just want to focus on the football.

I've had the good fortune to cover a lot of events at just about every level of sports. My friends who cover professional sports tend to sympathize when they hear I'm covering high school games; I tend to sympathize that they feel that way, because I still find the games themselves as much fun to cover as anything I do. (With deadlines, actually covering the games often isn't so much fun, but that's not the issue here — and my experience is nobody really cares to hear about that stuff anyway.) Not to wax too poetic about the purity of the event and the glow of the Friday Night Lights, but it's true that there are probably more people — players and coaches — involved solely for the love of the game at this level than any other.

With rare exceptions, if you're not a dominant player at the high school level, you're not going to continue up the football ladder, and there are a lot more players out there who are not dominant than there are stars. Life being what it is, the stars get the attention, but it's the other guys who really make high school football what it is, and probably deserve the most kudos for playing.

Beyond that, there's simply a fun factor in high school football that gets lost at most other levels. There's a greater willingness to gamble and experiment, and there's certainly a much greater level of unpredictability. Sure, there are a handful of teams that win all the time, just as there are a handful that lose with regularity. But the middle ground is huge, and there will be some amazing and wholly inexplicable games involving that vast middle ground of good-but-not-flawless or bad-but-not-hopeless teams.

It's great stuff. It would be even greater if everyone would leave it alone.

Unfortunately, that's not the way things work. And so we have what seems to be a slow creep toward turning high school football into NCAA Lite, with national polls, national TV games (according to USA Today, there will be 24 high school games nationally televised this year on Fox or various and sundry ESPNs) and the newest trend, national showdowns.

The No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the first USA Today poll of 2007 — Southlake Carroll of Texas and Miami (Fla.) Northwestern — are scheduled to meet early in the season; the newspaper notes it would only be the third 1-vs.-2 game in the 25-year history of its national poll — but the first involving teams crossing state lines. Rest assured it won't be the last. There's an increasing realization there's money to be made off high school sports, and more and more people are interested in making it. Can a high school BCS be far behind?

How far of a step would that be from the high school bowl games we already have in California? Not only have they made it possible for a team to win a Southern Section championship and feel disappointed — if it doesn't get selected for one of the three bowl games — they also make it possible — if a team plays a Week 0 game — for a team to play a 16-week, 15-game schedule.

That's one week shorter than the NFL regular season, one game more than could be required to win a BCS title. If you want to argue that's too much football, well, you won't get a rebuttal here.

Such issues form the cloud on the horizon of high school football.

As the season begins, they shouldn't be ignored. But they also shouldn't overshadow the bright sunshine of a new season.

Because the good of high school football still far outweighs the bad.

Which is why the new season is such a good thing.

— Contact Star columnist David Lassen at dlassen@VenturaCountyStar.com.