A story is told about Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers. After a particularly terrible loss to another team, he walked into the locker room the next day and announced to the players that they were going to start over again from the beginning. He picked up a football, pointed to it with his other hand and announced, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” One player raised his hand and said, “Coach, can you go slower so I can take notes?” The rumor is that Vince Lombardi cut the player that day.
With sincere apologies to the great Lombardi, we also will start at the beginning. American football is played with the oval-shaped ball pictured above. One nickname for a football is “the pigskin.” I am not sure why (I started to say maybe it was made of pigskin, but then I remembered that the darn thing is leather, which usually comes from cows, so why wouldn’t its nickname be “the cowhide”?) but I will find out and share what I learn in a later post.
Football is played upon a flat field 100 yards in length, not counting the green space behind each of the two end lines, which are also called goal lines. The space behind each of the two end lines is called “the end zone.”
There are two teams, and each team is assigned a goal line to protect. The object of the game is for one team to take the football across the other team’s goal line. When a team member is able to do that, either by running the ball over the line, or catching the ball past the line in the green unmarked space, that is called a touchdown. A touchdown is worth six points. After the touchdown, the team that scored it can choose either to kick the ball through the goal post, the “point after kick”, worth one point, or to run a play from the two-yard line and try to run or throw the ball into the end zone. If the team is successful in that attempt, then it receives two points. Most announcers will use the phrase “going for two” if a team does that.
When a team has the football and is moving down the field, it is considered to be on offense. The team that is trying to stop the ball from being moved is on defense.
The team that scores the most points in the sixty minutes of playing time alloted to each game wins. Those sixty minutes are divided into four separate periods of time fifteen minutes each, called quarters.
After two quarters, there is a break, which is called half-time. It is twelve minutes long in a National Football League game, but twenty minutes in a college football game. The coaches and players use half-time to rest and go over changes to the way they are playing the game. These changes are called “adjustments.” Spectators use half-time to get refreshments and take care of other necessary errands, whether viewing the game at the stadium or on television.
Some of you who have been aware of football for years but not really paid attention are now doing the math and realizing that a televised football game usually lasts three hours, not seventy-two minutes. That is because the sixty minutes is only used up in actual playing time. When a play is finished, in certain circumstances, the officials stop the clock and allow the teams to get lined up at the new ball position. Some penalties can stop the clock, and a score always stops the clock long enough to allow television to run commercials as well as to allow the team that scored the points to kick the ball to the other team. (We will cover the complete kicking game another time.) Once the officials are ready for play to resume, then the clock starts again.
I think that is enough for now, don’t you? Stay tuned for next time, when we will discuss the rule of four, four downs that is. Until then, may all your games be exciting and your teams win!
