Welcome to TXHSFB Inside the Numbers — where Dave Campbell's Texas Football take the data that makes up Texas high school football, and try to figure out what it means looking back and looking forward. Today: where the UIL Texas high school football state championship games should be played, according to coaches.

It's the crown jewel of Texas high school football — and, therefore, high school football in the United States. There is nothing quite like the UIL Texas high school football state championship games, with 12 games scattered across four days, with nearly a quarter-million fans in attendance and millions more tuned in at home, a spectacle unlike anything in the world. And that's why it's such a topic of sizzling and never-ending debate.

Since the UIL began playing its state championship games at a single site in 2010, AT&T Stadium has been almost exclusively the home for the event — every year except 2015, the title games have been hosted in Arlington. But should they? That's a point of contention among fans, with strong arguments on both sides.

At Dave Campbell's Texas Football, we decided to take the question to a constituency that obviously cares a great deal about the issue: Texas high school football head coaches. In the 2019 summer edition of Dave Campbell's Texas Football, we surveyed 253 active Texas high school football coaches from across the state and in all classifications, and asked them where the state championships should be played. The responses were anonymous, so as to get the most unfiltered, honest answers. We gave the coaches eight different options:

• Always be played at AT&T Stadium in Arlington
• Always be played at NRG Stadium in Houston
• Always be played at the Alamodome in San Antonio
• Return to a neutral site decided by the coaches
• Rotate evenly between Arlington and Houston
• Rotate evenly between Arlington, Houston and San Antonio
• Rotate venues, with AT&T Stadium in Arlington hosting most years
• Rotate venues, with NRG Stadium in Houston hosting most year

The responses were certainly interesting, but the coaches spoke loud and clear.

Overwhelmingly, the coaches said that they like things the way that they are — 58.1% of respondents said that the UIL state championship games should always be played at AT&T Stadium in Arlington. The next-most popular response: an even three-way rotation between AT&T Stadium, NRG Stadium in Houston and the Alamodome in San Antonio, which garnered 24.5% of the votes. No other response received more than 7% of the vote, but the third-highest response was actually to return the games to a neutral site decided by the coahes (like prior to the 2010), receiving 6.3% of the votes.

What is particularly interesting: coaches of all classifications preferred to play at AT&T Stadium, and the smaller the schools got, the more they favored Arlington. Here are the  crosstabs by classification of coach, with the most popular and second most-popular choices.

Coaches in Class 6A — the largest classification — are pretty evenly split, with Arlington getting just 1.6% more votes than a three-city rotation. But as you go down the classifications, the preference for AT&T Stadium widens. It all culminates in Class 1A (six-man football), where the 14 coaches surveyed all chose AT&T Stadium as their preferential venue. Is that indicative of the entire six-man coaching world? Likely not. But it speaks to a trend that the smaller the school, the more they tend to prefer Arlington as the state championship site.

But no matter what the coaches think, the debate about the site of the Texas high school football state championship games will no doubt rage on.