HOUSTON – To be called a “hog” on a football field is somewhat of a badge of honor if you’re an offensive lineman.

But Liberty High School has hogs it simply doesn’t want – because they’re the feral hole-digging football-field-ruining kind.

“We came out to practice about 7:30 in the morning, only to find holes five foot wide, a foot and a half deep,” said Liberty Panthers head football coach Chad Taylor.

Liberty High School borders acres of park land that apparently plays host to at least one group of wild hogs.

Last week when the coach gave the parched football practice field a good sprinkler soaking, it drew the sounder of hogs to the 50-yard line looking for a nice soft place to root and wallow.

“It’s amazing the damage they can do in just a few hours,” said Steve Horelica with Deep South Trapping who offered to help solve the problem for free.

Horelica set up a feeding station in the woods north of the football field and installed a game camera to see how many hogs he might be dealing with.

So far he’s taken pictures of at least 18. Now he’s surrounded his feeding station with a circular fence, continues to feed the hogs until they get used to the enclosure, and next will install a remotely operated trap door.

“All we have to do is text a code to the gate and it shuts immediately,” he said of the trap he hopes to spring this weekend. “It makes trapping pretty easy. You can sit at home in your recliner watching TV trapping hogs!”

Wild hogs are a Texas nuisance and by some estimates, a rapidly procreating nuisance that’s 5 million strong in Texas alone.

A nuisance in Liberty that a head football coach hopes a carefully drawn game plan will solve this coming weekend.

“Under the right conditions, left unchecked, in four months the population can double,” said Horelica. “They’re very leery and very smart. They learn very quick. But I think by Monday we’re going to have the group.”

“After the fact you kind of giggle about it and think what else could happen today,” said Taylor.

In the meantime, the coach jokes that he hopes his team, especially his lineman, can get some inspiration out of all this.

“I need my hogs up front to be as nasty as these hogs were on that particular morning,” said Taylor.

So that Liberty’s football-playing hogs make it to the playoffs, while the other hogs (the feral hole-digging football-field-ruining kind) meet the end of the line