We’ve all been there, watching a football game either on TV or in person, and you just have no idea what is going on. You then ask a friend to explain it to you and they give the most confusing answer with technological terms that you don’t know — like, I’m sorry, but what the heck is an interception.
Honestly, who knows why you want to learn about this slightly aggressive sport. Maybe you’re just curious. Maybe living in ~Philadelphia~ just has you in the football mood #gobirds! Or, maybe, you just wanna impress the cute boy in your class with your use of the word “touchdown” and “Nick Foles.”
Ladies, let’s skip the confusing terminology and make this process as painless as possible.
Before the game starts, there’s a coin toss between the captains of each team, the winner chooses who starts with the ball first, the other team chooses which direction they go in. Whatever they choose, the other team gets the other option. To start the game, there is a kickoff, which is when team A kicks the ball down the field to team B and they have the option to catch it and run so they get a closer start or they can let it go if they can’t get to the ball and just start at the 25 yard line. But honestly, don’t even worry about knowing about the 25 yard line, because they’re going to start somewhere LOL! ( I promise that will be the only slightly confusing explanation in this article.)
Now let’s get to the basics of the game, the point is to get down the field, while avoiding getting tackled by the other team to ultimately get a touchdown. Basically, the team on offense has four tries to pass the imaginary line that always shows up on the TV, also known as the 10 yard line, but let’s keep it simple and go with the “imaginary line.” The quarterback throws or hands off the ball to a teammate to try and cross that line, if they do cross the line, they get to keep going and get another four tries to cross the next imaginary line to get a touchdown. But if they don’t cross the line, they try again from where they were tackled. And if they run out of tries, the other team gets the ball. As you can see below, the blue line is where they started and the orange line is what they have to cross.
Here is how the teams can get points: The touchdown, where the offense player catches or runs the ball into the endzone — this is worth six points. After getting a touchdown the team has a chance to get one more point by kicking a field goal, which is when they kick it into the field goal post, or the uppercase “Y” shape, at the end of the field. Another scenario where a team can get points is if they think that they don’t have a good chance of running or catching the ball into the endzone, but they’re close enough, they can choose to just do a field goal worth three points.
After a quick consultation with my dad about this so I had my facts straight, he got way too into it with all these concepts and different scenarios. So I had to cut him off and stick to the basics. Dads, amiright?
Looks like we’re ready for football season ladies, Go Owls and Go Birds!