At the end of Richard Linklater's 1970s coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confused (1993), an inebriated teenager encourages her peers to be optimistic: 'Maybe the 80s will be radical, you know?' Twenty-three years later, Linklater has provided a response to this suggestion with the film's 'spiritual sequel', Everybody Wants Some!!. Set in 1980 at an unspecified Texan college, Everybody Wants Some!! traces an ensemble cast of college baseball players as they negotiate masculinity, camaraderie, sex, and the forging of identity beyond the adolescent boundaries of high school.

In keeping with Linklater's fascination with story duration (Boyhood, the Before series, Slacker), Everybody Wants Some!! follows Jake (Blake Jenner), a handsome freshman pitcher, over a three-day period prior to the commencement of his first college year. The action begins when Jake arrives at his new lodgings, a dilapidated frat-style house on the brink of collapse, cohabitated by a cohort of gregarious men that he – and the audience – will come to know as his idiosyncratic teammates. Among them are the antagonistic captain, McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin), and the group's charismatic social and intellectual leader, Finnegan, played by the magnetic Glen Powell. With a melange of personalities, humour derived from competitive masculinity, the constant pursuit of sexual companions, and a 'meet cute' established between Jake and a romantic interest, Everybody Wants Some!! seems to be a standard generational rite of passage film.