Stream It Or Skip It?

When a college president opens the doors of her home to the football team after their dorm floods, she immediately regrets welcoming their chaos into her life. But when their handsome coach moves in to keep the boys in line, sparks fly in the Hallmark Channel’s Home Turf.

HOME TURF: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A chipper woman walks across the idyllic campus, of the fictional Whittendale College in Ohio, greeting everyone she meets. She’s Cassidy (Nikki DeLoach), the new college president who’s only been on the job a month but is making herself known to everyone on campus.

The Gist: Cassidy Miller is an upbeat but type-A kinda woman. While she’s a devoted educator, she’s hyper-organized, a perfectionist problem solver. So when she learns that she’s inherited a budget shortfall and the school trustees are threatening to cut the arts programs at the school, she’s got to devise a way to come up with cash, quick. To add to Cassidy’s woes, she learns that a pipe has burst in the dorm where the football team lives. Due to a housing shortage on campus, the football coach, Logan (Warren Christie) suggests that the displaced players live in the president’s house with Cassidy for the time it takes for the pipes to be repaired.

Cassidy doesn’t like being strong-armed into sharing her personal space, but in order to prove to the board of trustees that she’s a team player, she reluctantly agrees, letting five players move into her spare rooms. It’s immediately a disaster: these guys are slobs who take over the entire house, play ball in the garden, and worst of all, they use all of her oat milk for their protein shakes.

Cassidy’s solution is to force Logan, their coach, to move into the house too so that he can keep the players on their best behavior. It works, to an extent. The boys fall in line and do their part to keep the house in order, a good thing too, because it turns out they’ll need to stay there for a couple weeks — way longer than Cassidy expected.

While all of this is happening, Cassidy is also trying to entice a potential donor, a wealthy alum named Leo Farnsworth, into giving millions to the school to save the arts program. Cassidy and Logan know that if they can convince Farnsworth to donate a few million, they can find a creative way to ramp up the football program and the arts all at once, so they collaborate on a plan and grow closer as they work together. It’s a lot of fires for Cassidy to be putting out all at once, but eventually, with the football team and Logan’s help, everything works out for the best in the end (zone).

Our Take: Every single aspect of Home Turf is far-fetched and unrealistic: there’s no chance in hell that five college football players would go live in the president’s house if there’s a housing shortage on campus. And more to the point, there’s no chance that this very suggestion, coming from the football coach, should ever be taken seriously. (Why couldn’t they, say, go live with the coach himself?) But without any of that, we’d have no movie. I don’t hate the overall premise, but I hate how we get there — the fact that Cassidy is bullied into having the team live with her feels weirdly uncomfortable, and the fact that they destroy her house on day one is irritating (even is it’s completely predictable).

I know I’m taking this a little too seriously, but I watch these movies to be entertained, not annoyed, and I was thoroughly annoyed on Cassidy’s behalf for the first third of the movie. Cassidy is not a character so much as an entity responsible for solving all of the movie’s problems. And not only that, but as a character part of her brand is that she’s constantly being let down by the people closest to her. I spent most of the film just mad on her behalf.

Home Turf‘s bright spot is the eventual relationship that develops between Cassidy and the football players; it’s charming, I’ll admit, to watch her become something of a den mother to them, and they return the affection. And soon, the bros all realize that Cassidy and Logan would make a great pair, so they parent-trap them by setting up a sweet date for them. While I enjoyed the latter half of the movie once everyone started to form a cozy family unit, I just wish that some of the forced plot devices felt more organic and believable.

Parting Shot: Cassidy and Logan kiss as a group of students look on and cheer.

Performance Worth Watching: Laith Wallschleger stands out as Teddy, the most charming and sweet of the football bros living in the house.

Memorable Dialogue: When Logan tells Cassidy he’s running out for groceries, she asks him to buy her some oat milk. (In case you haven’t heard, oat milk is her thing.) “Plain oat milk. But you have to look at the cartons carefully because the plain and vanilla, they look exactly the same. And if they don’t have plain, then get me soy.” Honestly, this line feels ripped from real life because this is my struggle. Why do they make the plain and vanilla look the same? I also appreciate that this feels like a line that could exist if When Harry Met Sally was written in 2025.

Our Call: In most ways, Home Turf is completely ridiculous and implausible, but it’s also sweet and charming… It’s not a touchdown, maybe just a field goal. SKIP IT.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.