⚡ Short answer
Yes, it’s a true story. On Christmas Eve 1944, Marines from the 4th and 29th Regiments of the 6th Marine Division played a full-contact football game on a field of dirt and coral on Guadalcanal. Most of the 65 players had played college football; some had played in the NFL. The game ended 0–0. Months later, 15 of those players were killed at Okinawa. Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl streams on Netflix November 25, 2026.
There are war movies, and there are football movies, and then there’s this: a game so improbable that it sounds invented. It isn’t. The story was pieced together by Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights, in his 2022 book The Mosquito Bowl — and now his old collaborator Peter Berg has turned it into a film. Here’s what really happened.
How did the Mosquito Bowl start?
In late 1944, the 6th Marine Division was training on Guadalcanal for what would become the invasion of Okinawa. Because the military valued athletes, an astonishing number of star college players — and a few pros — had ended up in the same two regiments. The trash talk about which regiment had the better team got out of hand. One of the loudest voices belonged to John McLaughry, a former Brown University star who’d played for the New York Giants, who boasted that the 4th Regiment could hang with the NFL champion Chicago Bears.
So they settled it the American way: a game on Christmas Eve.
What was the game actually like?
- 65 players suited up — 56 had played college ball, and five had been team captains.
- The field was dirt, pebbles and sharp coral. No proper pads; players wore cut-off dungarees and T-shirts with numbers stenciled on the front.
- The crowd was roughly 1,500 Marines, and the game was broadcast on the Mosquito Network, the military radio station on Guadalcanal.
- The score: 0–0. All that talent, and nobody could score.
🧩 Quiz: Why “the Mosquito Bowl”?
Partly the island — Guadalcanal was notoriously insect-infested — and partly the radio station that broadcast it, the Mosquito Network. A tongue-in-cheek name for a bowl game nobody back home could attend.
Who are the four men at the center of the movie?
Bissinger’s book follows many Marines, but four became its emotional core, and they lead the film:
- John McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine) — a Brown University back and the son of Brown’s head coach, who had played for the New York Giants. He survived the war and later coached at Brown himself.
- Dave Schreiner (Tom Francis) — a two-time All-American end at Wisconsin from small-town Lancaster, Wisconsin. He turned down a medical-school deferment to enlist.
- Bob Bauman (Bill Skarsgård) — Schreiner’s Wisconsin teammate, a starting tackle from Harvey, Illinois.
- Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson) — the son of a Croatian immigrant coal miner from Illinois, a record-setting Purdue fullback drafted by the Cleveland Rams.
What happened to them at Okinawa?
About three months after the game, the Marines landed on Okinawa for what became one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific War. It lasted 82 days. Fifteen of the 65 Mosquito Bowl players were killed there, and roughly 20 more were wounded.
Butkovich was among the dead. Bauman was killed on June 6, 1945. Schreiner made it through 81 of the battle’s 82 days before he was shot; he died of his wounds on the final day, the last Mosquito Bowl player to be killed. Back home, the University of Wisconsin later named two dormitories after Bauman and Schreiner. McLaughry came home.
🎖️ A personal twist
While researching the book, Bissinger discovered that his own father had served in the 4th Marine Regiment on Guadalcanal during the Mosquito Bowl, and then fought on Okinawa. He had never really talked about it.
How to watch The Mosquito Bowl
The film had a run in select theaters starting October 30 and streams on Netflix on Wednesday, November 25 — Thanksgiving Eve, the same night Netflix streams its first-ever Thanksgiving Eve NFL game (Packers at Rams). That’s a football double feature if we’ve ever seen one. Our Thanksgiving week streaming plan has the full lineup.
🗳️ Quick poll: What are you most curious to see on screen?
- The game itself on that coral field
- The friendship between Schreiner and Bauman
- Okinawa — and how honestly it’s shown
- Galitzine and Skarsgård in leatherhead mode
Drop your number in the comments — we tally the votes and update this post with the results.
Netflix’s own deep dive, The True Story of The Mosquito Bowl, has photos of the real men.
