Season 10 Episode 10: Dud Bowl II

November 26, 1995

Published 11/26/95

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