About Football…..
Football began in the 19th century and has slowly developed over time becoming one of the most exciting sports played around the world. Football grew out of a combination of soccer and rugby and has developed into the single most popular sport in America. Football is also gaining popularity around the world through NFL Europe, the Canadian Football League, arena football and other avenues.
THE POSITIONS:
American Football from wikipedia found HERE
THE GAME:
The game of football has three main phases. You can play offense, defense or special teams. The way these three phases come together is what makes football what it is. The object of the game is to score points by advancing the ball past the opponent’s end zone (a line at the end of the field). The opponent has to try and prevent your team from crossing that line. The team that is on offense is controlling the ball, there is a team playing defense trying to prevent them from scoring.
The offensive teams gets 4 chances to advance the ball. These are called “downs”. You have four downs to try and advance the ball. If you are successful in advancing the ball at least ten yards, you receive another set of four downs. The ball may be advanced either by throwing it through the air, or by running with the ball on the ground. The defense must come up with schemes to prevent the offense from advancing the ball. How? They bring the person’s body that possesses the ball to the ground. Once the ball carrier touches the ground with their body, they are considered “down”, meaning they are no longer allowed to advance until the next down begins and that play is over. The ball is placed at that spot. If the offense is not able to score or gain the ten yards needed to earn another set of downs, they may have to punt the ball.
A punt is a ball that is kicked from a player’s hands that travels to an awaiting player from the opposite team. So the punting team brings us to another phase of the game known as the “Special Teams”. These are the kicking units; the punt team, the kickoff team, and the field goal team. In backyard football and flag football, special teams are rarely used. Sometimes people play with punts and kickoffs, but you never see field goals. Simply because, in most backyard football, there are no goal posts to use and people don’t have experience using them. The excitement and pleasure in playing football is not diminished by eliminating the field goal, so the game still works.
BACKYARD FOOTBALL ANYONE???
How else can you emulate your favorite quarterback? Do you want to be Joe Monatna for a day? Do you want to impress the ladies with your catching ability? Ever wondered if you could pull off the same moves that Barry Sanders did? Catch like Jerry Rice? If your not a pro athlete, you are perfect for backyard football. All you need is a ball and an immense love of the game or a competitive spirit and a few friends. Backyard football developed from the love of football and is being played everyday. In fact, you could say that backyard football is constantly being played all the time. Somewhere someone in the country is throwing the pigskin around with some buddies.
At family reunions and at all kinds of college and high school activities, everyone wants to throw around the good old pigskin. It starts out with a two people throwing the ball around. Then a third person shows up and wants to cover the guy catching. Then you end up playing ‘try to cover me’ and little bit of route running. A few minutes into this a few more people may jump in. Pretty soon you have an all out backyard football game.
Backyard football is played with all kinds of rules. You can play with flags, wrap, two-hand touch, or full blown tackle. You can play with anything you have handy, the kids do this all the time.
Oh, and make sure you eat your snickers bar……or you turn into “Betty White”!!!! (see below)