There are more than 7,000 Texas high school football games scheduled during the 2024 season, but none stranger than the one happening in Bay City on Friday night.

Tonight at Memorial Stadium in Bay City, the Carthage Bulldogs will face off against the San Benito Greyhounds. It's the first-ever meeting between the two programs, and for anyone who knows about these two programs, that's not a surprise.

You see, Carthage is nestled deep in east Texas, the heart of Panola County...while San Benito is down in the Rio Grande Valley, along the border with Mexico. The two towns are separated by a staggering 461 miles.

To put that in perspective: if you started in Chicago and went 461 miles directly south, you would be at the northern border of Alabama.

But then there's the size disparity. Carthage is the No. 1 team in DCTF's Class 4A Division II rankings, clocking in with an enrollment of 788...while San Benito is a Class 6A program, with an enrollment of 2,815 — more than 3.5 times that of Carthage's. Put in college football terms: Texas A&M (~72,000 enrollment) is about 3.5 times bigger than Baylor (~20,600).

(For the record, the DCTF computer thinks Carthage is a comfortable favorite over the Greyhounds.)

Why is this game happening? Well, they each needed a dance partner — San Benito is in a five-team District 32-6A down in the Rio Grande Valley, meaning they needed to find six non-district games for a full 10-game season. Carthage is in a six-team District 8-4A DII, but they already took an open date in Week 2 because, well, when you've won nine state championships since 2008, opponents are not exactly lining up to play you.

And so, tonight in Bay City, we'll have two teams of wildly different sizes from wildly different parts of the state taking on one another. Texas forever.