Radio stars Ed Harris as the head football coach of a southern (South Carolina, I think) high school in the 70s (or maybe early 80s). He develops a friendship with a learning disabled student nicknamed Radio played by Cuba Gooding. Radio becomes an equipment manager and inspirational leader for the team. It is based on a true story, and I believe that Radio is still involved with the team to this day.
Here is the movie's official site: http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/radio/
I put this movie on my list for two reasons. First, it has a great lockerroom motivational speech scene. More importantly though, I believe this movie (which was released in 2003) was the first to really go to great lengths to get the game action right. Prior to this movie almost all football movies had a bunch of very fat, unathletic guys (i.e. obviously not real football players) on the field for game action scenes, and the game action looked really amateurish (see my comments about Any Given Sunday). Since Radio, most good football movies (such as Friday Night Lights, which I belive used the same technical advisor) have had excellent looking game footage. On the DVD bonus material there was a featurette about how they did the football scenes. They actually had tryouts to be on the film's teams, and as the football tech advisor said, "If you didn't at least make first team All State in high school, you shoudn't even bother trying out." Real football players playing real football (obviously with choregraphed plays, but still real players really playing) made for the first really good game footage, and set the bar for every fooball movie that came after it.
