Back in the game

After a longer than anticipated hiatus, In the game is back! As the summer and all its distractions wind down, I will now be posting fairly regularly, so check back often.

Football season is now underway and I recently had a request for some posts to help make sense of this sport. I will warn you now: football can be very confusing. It is not your basic “put ball in net” game, and there are a ridiculous amount of rules and positions and plays etcetera, etcetera. The good news is, I will not bore you to death trying to explain the nuances of the game. Rather, I’ll give you some general explanations, keep you updated on any big events, and introduce you to some fine looking athletes along the way. Deal?

I’ll start us off today with some basic information. American football is the second most popular sport in the United States (behind baseball) and has millions of fans around the world. College football is huge, but we’ll mostly be talking about professional football here – the NFL, or National Football League.

Each team plays once a week, almost always on Sunday or Monday. This is just one of the unique things about football – unlike other sports like baseball (162) or hockey (82), each football team plays only 16 games a year. So while the NFL season may seem interminable to those of you who have a football-addicted spouse, it actually only runs from September to February.

So how does football work? Though I previously said this was not a “put ball in net” kind of game, in a way it is. Imagine that the net is a big section at the end of the field (called the end zone). To score points, a team has to get the football into that area. The difference is that someone on that team has to be holding the ball while it’s in the end zone; you can’t just shoot it or kick it in.

Another difference? In football the teams take turns trying to score. First one side tries to get to the end zone while the other team tries to stop them. After a certain number of tries, they switch.

At the end of 60 minutes (though with stoppages in play and timeouts games usually take 2 ½ hours to play), the team with the most points wins. Simple, right?

I think that’s enough football for today. I promise you that the next football post will be a little less informational and a little more colourful. And I should also let you know that American football stars seem to like to get naked even more than their counterparts in European football, so look forward to Monday!