In life, every season counts.

Roy gets cut from his high school football team just days after his estranged father dies. For him, football is more than a proving ground; it is a promised escape from his lonely rural existence and salvation from the paralyzing passivity that dominates his life. Enter Gideon, a loner living on the roughneck fringe who is looking for "gamers" - kids who scrap hard - to play on his six-man football squad. Roy joins the Renegades, and he and Gideon enter into tenuous friendship that pushes the limits of male bonding.

"For all the violence that erupts, The Slaughter Rule doesn't have much dramatic momentum. This promising but confused first film is best viewed as a touching portrait of thwarted, volatile male passion in a world where you could almost say that geography is destiny." - Stephen Holden, NY Times