the pittsburgh steelers against........the cincinatti bengals. lots of colours and lines and shiny stuff and numbers and someone keeps drawing on the screen is he meant to be doing that, they seem to do a lot of standing about and apparently it last about 14 hours. 3-0 pittsburgh just now, 1st and 10, whatever the hell that is.
Beats the hell out of your "football". Soccer is boring as (*)(*)(*)(*). 14 hours? lol, where'd you pull that from?
some guy for one of the teams just failed to catch a ball that somebody threw at him there, seems to be quite a big deal. you wouldnt think it was that difficult but hey-ho.
The real question you should ask is what he is being paid to catch those balls. I believe you are talking about a easy pass/catch to mike wallace. He is fast enough he could have qualified for the 200m in the past Olympics. Cincinnati is not a really good team. Pittsburgh is usually better than they have played so far this year. I think it is a acquired taste. College football, especially two good teams, is really fun to watch.
I grew up and spent significant amounts of my life in both the middle of America (bible belt, prairie, small town American football loving people) and in Wales. I only recently began to understand the complexity of American football after my father in law explained the rules of the game better than had ever been explained to me before. I can actually say having sat down and watched a bit of college football now it's quite a bit more interesting than I ever gave it credit for in the past. However, in direct comparisons with American football, Association football (soccer) is so much better it's not even funny.
I watch soccer in the olympics and the FIBA cup every 4 years but that is about it. Just too boring and little scoring. I wish they would increase the size of the net or decrease the amount of players that can come across center line or whatever they call it. Hard to compare the two really because they are so different.
exactly!!! thats why its the people's ballet, its the greatest game in the world all you need is a ball poor people all over the world play it express themselves through it escape poverty represent their country and culture and sometimes even influence political change. football is by far the biggest sport in the world, its a shame for you guys you just dont get how big a deal it is its absolutely massive everywhere but america, india and china, the 3 most populous countries in the world. oh and canada too. everywhere else they love it you see programmes from some lost tribe in the amazon that no outsider has had contact with for 400 years and theyre playing football, kids in afghanistan the same, so youre right it is the poor persons game and long may it be so.
I used to play with rocks when I was a kid, and was poor. I prefer my dirt bike, and snow boarding these days.
Personally, I prefer Australian Rules Football and Rugby. To each their own. My grandmother's definition of American Football: "They run around until they fall down. Those that can get up do, and those that can't they carry off". She was also fond of hockey - mainly for the fights. There are days when I miss roller derby - the old roller derby, not when they tried to sex it up with fake drama and fights like in world wide wrestling (showing my age).
So the basic idea is to move the ball down field to score a touchdown (6 points, and unlike rugby they don't touch the ball to the turf). After that they try to kick the ball through the "uprights" for an extra point, or less often try to run the ball in again from a short distance for 2 additional points. They have 4 tries (called "downs") to accomplish this. They can reset to the first "down" for every 10 yards they move the ball, hence "First and 10", as in "first down" and 10 yards to go to reset to first down again. If they don't get down far enough, they often use the 4th down to "punt" the ball down the field to the other team. If they get into the opponents half of the field, but can't get close enough for a touchdown, they may try for a "field goal" (kicking the ball through the "uprights") for three points. If they get caught with the ball behind the goal line they're defending, that's a "safety", which gives the opposing team 2 points. Getting a "safety" called against you is fairly rare. Of course there are a host of ways to get penalized yardage in your opponent's favor. How much yardage you're forced to give up depends on the severity of the penalty, and some can even result in the loss of a "down". If your opponent is called for a penalty but the end result of the play is more in your favor (say a long pass that advances you far up the field), you can decline the penalty. If a penalty moves the ball down the field far enough, it can result in giving you (or your opponents, depending on who has possession of the ball) a first down. I won't even attempt to explain all the strategy. I'll let an actual fan take on that responsibility.
Actually association football (soccer) had the chance to become the biggest sport in the United States at one point. It was actually played by more Americans before the turn of the century. Unfortunately association football was effectively "killed off" somewhat by the formation of two seperate governing bodies in the late 1880's, the AFA and the AAFA, that wanted to compete against each other for league competitions and cups. After the AAFA reorganized as the USFA and was granted membership into FIFA it pretty much killed off competition from the AFA, which was a bad thing for association football in the United States as the much older AFA still had a strong membership of clubs under its rule. Essentially, those two factors...the establishment of two governing bodies followed by FIFA granting membership to the USFA...guaranteed that American football would take precedence over association football. On a different scale the same thing happened in the UK when football rules were being codified in the 1850's and 1860's. There was a strong cohesion between rugby rules clubs and association rules clubs...meaning that games were often a confusing mismash of the two styles of play. It wasn't until the two fully seperated that seperate governing bodies were able to fully take control and finally codify the rules. However, unlike the seperation in America, this actually resulted in better leagues with more competition and a stronger governing body. It also spread thoughout the world faster since the height of British Imperialism was around 1850-1899, which coincided with with mass industrialization of british colonies and the direct links to british citizens playing games of football, cricket and rugby with the indigenous peoples from the lands they were conquering.
