When Peggy lands a substitute teaching job at Arlen High, she quickly becomes Persona Non Grata for flunking the school's star football player.
Tropes:
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Peggy hopes to make an impact and make herself known at the high school. When she flunks David, she does indeed earn attention. Negative attention.
- Cool Teacher: Played around with regarding Peggy, who briefly reverts back to her earlier season personality and is actually making an effort to be a good teacher to David. Not for her ego mind you, but so he can earn a decent grade and so he actually gets an education.
- Did You Think I Can't Feel?: David's outraged when he learns his own mother and the rest of the booster club are willing to convince everyone he's mentally challenged to excuse his poor grades, regardless of how that makes him feel.
- Dumb Jock: Subverted. David isn't stupid per-se. Just very lazy on account of the school, the booster club, and even his own mother (who tricked Peggy into thinking he has a learning disability) helping him coast through his classes. Once he finds out the truth, he turns to Peggy for help to legitimately work on his studies so he can continue playing.
- Exact Words: In order to convince Peggy that things are on the level, Hank says David knows more about propane than any Hawaiian person he's ever met. Given how few Pacific Islander Americans live in Texas, it's quite possible that he actually is purely by default.
- Hypocrite: Hank Hill, a man who values hard work and ethics more than anything, gives David a pass on his horrible work study essay (after setting up said work study specifically to make things as easy as possible for David) just to keep him on the football team. It's deconstructed as Hank first has to steel himself by drinking a beer in order to mark the grade, and ultimately cannot go through with the charade when the guilt eats away at him and he sees how destroyed Peggy is when she genuinely starts to think David's awful grades were because she wasn't a good enough teacher.
- Late to the Realization: David is offended when he finds out everybody has just been letting him coast by because of football and all think he's too stupid to do it himself.
- Nice Guy: David turns out to be a genuinely nice, if lazy and slightly entitled, person who is offended learning everyone was letting him get away with bad grades because they didn't think he was capable of doing the work on his own.
- Skewed Priorities: Pretty much every teacher in the school is more concerned with David's on-field performance than his academic. Hell, even his mother goes along with it because she thinks that it's the only way he'll have a successful future. David even calls them out on it near the end, not that it really gets through.
- Special Guest: Brendan Fraser as David.
- Touché: When Peggy talks down to David as if he has a learning disability (after his mom and the booster club tricked the Hills into thinking it) and then asks him if he "pooped himself," David admits he deserved that because of how easy he made it for them to think he was disabled.
