ORLANDO, Fla. — Not so long ago, people looking for a high school football fix spent Friday nights at their team's stadium. They had few other options.

But this fall, sports fans didn't have to leave their living rooms.

When they turned on their TVs, they could've flipped to NBC's new show "Friday Night Lights," a drama about a team in rural Texas. Or they could've watched MTV, which airs "Two-A-Days: Hoover High," a reality show about a state-championship team in Alabama. Or they could have tuned into any one of the 13 high-school games televised live by ESPN's networks. And one of the key characters on the hit TV show "Heroes" is a high school football cheerleader.

Even TV commercials sometimes revolved around high school football. In September, ads flooded the airwaves for "Gridiron Gang," a movie about a team at a juvenile-detention facility. Even Nike got into the act, with its "Briscoe High" ad campaign, which cast NFL stars Michael Vick, LaDainian Tomlinson and Brian Urlacher as high-school football players.

More than ever, high-school football has seeped into popular culture. The sport's presence has grown on the Internet for years, with the proliferation of Web sites devoted to college recruiting. Now the sport has made dramatic inroads into other areas.

"It really is exploding this year for some reason," said Burke Magnus, the vice president and general manager of ESPNU, an 18-month-old cable network devoted primarily to college sports but also home to nationally televised high-school games.

"We're certainly not alone here. There's NBC and MTV and Sports Illustrated and USA Today and other television outlets. They all seem to have come to the party now on high-school sports."

Everywhere you look these days, high school sports — especially football — are en vogue. All of the entities highlighting it seem to be trying to tap into the love of the game.

"For us, a passion for football at the high school level is at its purest form," Nike spokesman Brian Facchini said. "It's just recognizing that that's where the passion really starts for the game."

In the process, some people worry that the sport is losing one of the things that made it great in the first place: its purity.

The players and coach at Hoover High in Hoover, Ala., are known well beyond the Birmingham suburbs — and not just because they've won four consecutive state titles.

It's because of "Two-A-Days," a show popular enough that it's coming back for a second season. The program focuses more on the players' dating lives and Coach Rush Propst's often obscenity-laced tirades than it does on X's and O's.

To advertise the show, MTV recently plastered the images of four Hoover players and Propst onto the hood and fenders of a stock car that wheeled its way around NASCAR tracks. How many teenagers get that kind of treatment?

Shows such as "Two-A-Days" give advertisers and marketers access to young viewers.

"High school sports appeals ... to the people who look up to teenagers, a group that are those high school kids, and then there's that nostalgic identity that many people have with their high-school years," said Michael Mokwa, the chairman of the marketing department at Arizona State University and the president of the Sport Marketing Association.

The show's critics have complained that Propst uses too many curse words in the show — which paid the Hoover school system $25,000 — and that the dating lives of players and their girlfriends were exploited.

"There were minimal complaints locally, and I think most of that was due to jealousy of our football program or our success," Propst said.

"The exposure's outstanding. When you look at a kid that moves in from another school and he wants to play at a big-time program because he's seen `em on TV, your name is out there. No matter where we go now, Hoover High School's known."

The exposure also comes in the form of televised games.

On Aug. 27, 2005, ESPN aired Hoover's game against Ponte Vedra Beach (Fla.) Nease, a team led at that time by current Florida quarterback Tim Tebow. The interstate matchup drew a 1.03 rating, which is equivalent to nearly 1 million households. That's much higher than the typical high school rating and still only about half the number of viewers for the typical ESPN college broadcast.

But networks such as ESPNU have programming slots to fill, and Magnus acknowledged that televising high school games is less expensive than college games simply because there are no rights fees. The participating teams typically are paid only for their travel expenses.

Some experts are skeptical that the exposure is a good thing.

"There has been lately a great deal of generated interest in the high-school game," said Bob Kanaby, the executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations. "Whether it's good or bad, quite frankly, I think that jury is still out."

Larry Gergley, who started as Winter Park's football coach in 1971, said too much media attention can have an adverse effect on players.

"There is a danger in too much recognition too soon and having a person who's not fully matured having all the recognition in being a top player who's being recruited by every school in the country," Gergley said.

The high school sports craze, many coaches think, started in large part because of the Internet. The Net allows rabid college sports fans to follow their favorite schools' recruiting in real time.