Walter Matthau was originally supposed to be the coach...

...but it didn't work out. Originally the script called for him to pull Tom Cruise out and put his daughter in the game, the first female to ever play high school football for Ampipe varsity. But she gives up a touchdown so Matthau's character throws a beer at her. So the next time out, to get revenge, she makes an interception but she intentionally runs toward her team's own end zone, and all her teammates try to tackle her but too late, and she gets up and hands coach Matthau the football and walks off and Matthau's wife strides up and calls him a bastard. But I think they decided against that script version because it conflicted with the name of the movie, "All the Right Moves." Giving up a touchdown, fathers throwing beers at their daughters, intentionally scoring points for the other team, well, they just ain't the "right moves", unless irony is what they were going for, and they wadn't. I think they brought in John Hughes to do a rewrite but next thing you know the script had Lea Thompson, Tom Cruise and Molly Ringwald taking their clothes off in the projector room of the school library and Emilio Sheen taping the kid who fumbled's butt cheeks together with duct tape - once again, not the right moves unless teh setting were to be changed to a frat party, and it wadn't. And about that time, that movie was about to come out called "The Right Stuff" and the filmmakers didn't want to get the movies confused amongst the American public, especially since the content of each film is almost identical (one similarity is the "phallic" symbolism the football and the Saturn V rocket both portray and how each tries to get in close with the hot jail-bait number that lives next door only to lose out to an alto-sax, another is that in one movie you see Tom Cruise's wang and in the other it's Gus Grissom flashing his goodies). So they rushed the project to completion by bringing in Craig T. Nelson to play the coach, and he turned out to be the right choice for the role because after he went off to coach tradional powerhouse California Polytechnic Institute of Technology - San Luis Obispo (he chose to leave because his nearby home ended up having dead bodies under the swimming pool and a tree that tried to devour one of his kids because he went with a prevent defense and lost to archrival DeVry), he got the much-coveted Minnesota State job and was able to bring in assistant coaches Dick van Dyke and Patrick Star who went on to greater things together as head coach and shoulders coach, respectively, at The University of Phoenix during a couple of 1-10 seasons. Amazing, how history could have been so much different.