American Sports enthusiast and guest writer Sam Martin told Amelia Harper exactly what American Football entails.
Perhaps the greatest oxymoron in sport – American Football has very little to do with your feet. Instead it is a game of physicality and brutal strength combined with an almost militaristic level of tactical mastery.
American football is a sport that is predominantly played in North America and the National Football League, the NFL, is the most valuable sports league in the world. Each of the 32 teams makes billions of dollars a year and this isn’t even taking into account the highly popular College Football system too.
Sport across America
The sport is an institution in America. It starts from a young age with peewee football and high-school football mattering greatly to local communities. After this, the best players will head to the college of their choice to further their career.
This is nothing like BUCS sport in the UK though. Prestigious programs such as Michigan, Ohio State, Alabama and USC attract 100,000 spectators per game, yes 100,000 people pack into a stadium to watch university sport. College football is a religion across America.
National Football League (NFL)
After this, the best college players will be drafted into the NFL to play for one of the 32 teams that are split into two conferences – the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). It is the winners of both these conferences that face off in the Super Bowl to be crowned NFL champions.
This year it was a battle between the AFC’s New England Patriots and the NFC’s Los Angeles Rams with the Patriots coming out on top, gaining their sixth title in 17 years.
NFL Teams
NFL teams are massive, there are 52 players on each team, and they are split into Offensive Players and Defensive players that take to the field separately from one another. The offence is in charge of scoring the points.
An NFL pitch is 100 yards long and it is the job of the offence to progress down the pitch and score. They have four attempts to make 10 yards or more to keep the possession alive. If they don’t get 10 yards in their four attempts, then the ball is kicked away and turned over to the other team.
The defence is simply there to make it as hard as possible for the offense to make these 10 yards and thus turn the ball over so their offence can try and score points.
This is a highly tactical game and each team has hundreds of set plays designed to bamboozle the opposition and thus score points. Each player knows before the ball is snapped into action what their exact job is which makes the sport more like a military encounter than say, rugby.
In this highly competitive league, the best team of the last 20 years has been the New England Patriots, led by Quarterback Tom Brady and Head Coach Bill Belichick. They have dominated the NFL like no other pair in the 100-year history of the sport.
However, young guns like the Kansas City Chiefs and the Los Angeles Rams are currently doing their best to unseat these older figures and bring success to their cities too.
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