new ideas for prep football preview sections...

Hopefully this link will take you to the right spot on News Page Designer. It shows an example of two team pages The (Fort Wayne) News-Sentinel did a couple of years ago. Setting aside whether you like themes or not (and I know a bunch of posters here don't), these previews have a lot of information in them, written in short, easily accessed chunks. Even though the "mainbar" is only about six inches long, readers get a ton of information from the related rails and breakout boxes.
http://www.newspagedesigner.com/portfolios/portfolio1.php?pageNum_rsUserPages=9&totalRows_rsUserPages=96&UserID=530

If you don't like themes, place a boring practice or file shot on the page instead.

 

Well, Rich, I'm guessing you like themes.

I'll still hold to the theory that if you "force" a theme upon your football preview section, you wind up ... well, "forcing" it. You make unnatural stretches so that the content matches the theme.

And (where's DP to see this shit?) ... the design cannot drive the content. The content must drive the design.

(P.S. I'm with you on practice shots ... they're death. But file shots? If you have good photographers, they're coming back with 5-6 good action shots from a game. You aren't using them all live. We have plenty of good action to use in the next year's tab.)