5 reasons why American football is a great sport

You may not be aware that the Super Bowl is coming up this weekend. In fact, you may not even know what the Super Bowl is. In short it is the final of the American football season, the end result of 17 weeks of main season games and then a few more weeks of knock-out matches. The Super Bowl is one of THE cultural events in the US calendar, getting ridiculous viewing figures, and the winners get a trophy and each get a ring, which they keep for life as a token of their success. However you measure it (success, money involved, TV figures) it is a big thing.

And I’ll be watching, all the way from the build up to the first kick to the final catch, 11pm to 4am. Bring it on!

But what makes it so compelling? After all, in the UK it is a much maligned sport – it’s called FOOTball when all the main action involves throwing and catching, you score a touchdown without the ball being.....touched down, the players are wusses who wear body armour and (for many Brits) it’s got that awful word ‘American’ in its name.  Add in the massive stadiums, the stereotypical fat American and the perceived slow pace of the sport and it can be portrayed as a waste of time. That to me does a disservice to a sport with a very interesting history (which I won’t go into), brilliant tactics, amazingly professional athletes and coaches and a unique recruitment method.

For the uninitiated, I’ve written an outline of the sport as a footnote and the BBC has a good video here as well.

But let’s crack on with the list:

1. The tactics

Every move in American football is part of a wider event called a ‘play’. Every member of the teams on defence and offence have assigned roles, routes to run, timed moments to turn around, areas to cover or people to watch. Some of these plays are predictable – a guy will run with the ball at some point in every game – but others are masterpieces of feint, misdirection and suggestion, designed to confuse the opponents players and coaches. They are therefore crafted and applied at certain moments in games to gain particular results. Coaches have folders full of plays (different from Romney’s binders of women) which they guard tightly. Every player needs to know what they are doing for every play they are involved in, and some, such as the quarterback, needs to know every individual’s role in a play in order to assess their options when trying to move the ball forwards.

Some say this slows the game down, as you get 6 second bursts of excitement followed by 30 seconds of substitutions and (perceived) inaction, but that is to miss the point. In that gap coaches are working through thoughts on the plans of their opponents, quarterbacks are assessing the state of the defence to work out what they’re planning and players are trying to watch their assigned person (their ‘tacklee’?) without being seen to be looking. It may not look like it but the sport is like chess, finding weaknesses and exploiting them, defending and attacking at different times for different reasons. The tactics of American football excel anything in ‘soccer’ (urgh) or anything similar.

2. The professionalism

An American football team only consists of 11 people on the field at any one time. However, the roster of a team can be around 50 people, all of whom have particular roles once they are on the pitch. Each player trains hard and works at being the very best they can be in a specialised area of the sport.

As a starter, 11 players form the offensive team (when they have possession) and 11 others form the defensive team (when they don’t). But these players are interchangeable between plays, having rehearsed in training their role on the pitch (i.e. they can be replaced for a play they don’t know). There are also substitutions to deal with injuries.

Although limited, these guys are highly professional within their roles. The quarterback needs to know every offensive play inside out. A wide receiver has to have an awareness of the yardage they should run in every route they are assigned. A cornerback needs to know the running patterns of his opponents. They need to learn all this through time watching tapes and through doing running and throwing drills until they fall over.

Much is demanded of them and only the very best become true greats in the NFL.

3. The draft

American football is pretty unique in the way it recruits players, as most of them are bartered over by the 32 teams in the NFL through the system known as the draft. If I’m honest, the dark arts of the draft are still tough for me to fully understand (it can be VERY complicated!) but in short those teams that didn’t do too well in the previous season are given the chance to pick the very best of the newest batch of players. The idea is therefore that a bad team can become better, then go downhill once players become old before then getting another new crop and rising again. The system therefore says two things, one about where the players come from and then where the League goes.

Most players in the draft come through the US college (university) system. They train and play whilst they are at Uni, are scouted by the main teams and then go to a team through the draft. Often therefore (‘free agency’ exists as another method to get into the NFL but I won’t go into that) a player in the NFL is a college graduate with a degree and aged around 21-22 (though sometimes the money tempts them to leave Uni early). They are intelligent individuals who are almost always able to cope with the rigours that the NFL spotlight brings on a young man. I can’t help but feel an NFL player goes in more prepared for the lifestyle of professional sports than a 17 year old who plays in the Premier League.

But this also helps the League as well as it brings in fresh blood and helps teams to rise and fall. There are 32 teams in the NFL and only 4 of them have never played in a Super Bowl (this year gives us the 47^th Super Bowl). That’s a much richer mix than the Premier League, where the same 4-5 teams will be in the top 6-7 places each year. This makes it more exciting for the fans, who genuinely could see their team in the Super Bowl at the end of a season. Just to demonstrate, the Detroit Lions lost every game in the 2008 season, but then got a top college quarterback and only 3 years later won 10 of their games and made the wild card play-offs (like the quarter-finals).

4. The community

Yes the stadiums are massive (in fact this year’s Super Bowl is in the famous Superdome, where residents of New Orleans sought shelter and support in the wake of Hurricane Katrina) but this is because they aren’t just places where people go to watch a game of football. The game is a cultural event and a day out for everyone.

Tailgate parties are held in the stadium car park, with people cooking food and meeting to talk. Then they can go find their seats (opposing fans sit together, like in rugby) or get food, play games and buy merchandise. Then when they sit down there are mascots and cheerleaders dancing, big screens with highlights and statistics on them and competitions to take part in. It is a good thing that this is starting to happen in the UK as it creates a safe and fun environment and gives fans a pride in their team separate from their performance (in fact I heard a guy on 5live a few days ago boasting that his Coca-Cola League One team’s stadium would be opening an hour before kick-off ‘for the fans’ – this would be normal in the US).

All this creates the community spirit which is lacking in Premier League football and which makes it a fun day out for all the family (if they want to go of course!).

5. The drama

Now I’m not going to deny that all sport has tension. Only tonight I’ve watched Mali knock out South Africa in a penalty shoot out. However, American football seems to excel in this through the quick rate of scoring and the rapid changes that can happen within games. Indeed, so well known are some major plays that they get names that all fans can refer to. In the NFL there is ‘the Immaculate Reception’, ‘the Music City Miracle’ and even one play simply known as ‘the Catch’.

In my opinion it all comes down to the ‘play’ system in the sport. A game can go down to the wire, a result can turn on one moment because the players are tuned to do one particular thing and expect the play to run smoothly. One mistake, one intercepted throw or hard tackle or fumble can change events and the players have to respond in the moment. I can think of no better recent example than the moment in Super Bowl XLIII (ridiculously the number is in Roman numerals – added drama I suppose) when a linebacker (a defensive player) weighing 17 stone caught a ball and ran 100 yards for a touchdown. Normally he rarely walks more than a few feet on the pitch and so he needed oxygen once he scored! Improvisation and a break from what is expected leads to high drama, and those factors are found in stacks in American football.

There are other reasons but I hope I’ve at least persuaded any sceptics to give it a try – watch the Super Bowl on Sunday for a few minutes and see the clash of helmets, the athleticism, the tactics and craftsmanship in each play and at least see if you can appreciate American football as a sport. If you stick with it, you will find highlights every week of the season on the NFL website (they very cleverly keep the TV rights, unlike the FA). Pick a team, follow it for a bit and see what happens. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Debate warmly encouraged


The Super Bowl will be on BBC 1 from 11pm this Sunday


Rules

I won’t go over everything but here is a go at the real basics of American football:

Basically a team has 4 attempts to get the ball forward by ten yards. If they succeed, they get another four attempts to move it forward another ten yards and so on. The end result is that the ball will hopefully end up in the end zone, resulting in a touchdown for 6 points. Teams then score another point by putting it through two posts (similar to rugby) or can get two points if they put it in the end zone again. The attacking team is led by the quarterback, and yards are gained by a throw and catch or by someone running with it.

All the time this goes on the opposing team is trying to stop them from getting their ten yards and, normally, if the attacking team doesn’t succeed after three attempts (known as ‘downs’) they kick the ball away. The teams then swap roles and a whole new batch of team mates come on in a reversal of roles as the team that had been defending now tries to score.

Like most sports (take THAT golf!) whoever has the most points wins. And in this game, they win BIG, getting the rewards mentioned earlier and the dubious title of ‘World Champions’ (whilst technically true, even I have to join the sceptics here – the glamour of this is limited when you think through the number of countries in the world that don’t play the sport!)