Vince Lombardi, Legendary Football Coach

A story is told about Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers.  After a particularly terrible loss to another team, he walked into the locker room the next day and announced to the players that they were going to start over again from the beginning.  He picked up a football, pointed to it with his other hand, and announced, “Gentlemen, this is a football.”  One player raised his hand and said, “Coach, can you go slower so I can take notes?”  The rumor is that Vince Lombardi cut the player that day.

A Football

With sincere apologies to the great Lombardi, we also will start at the beginning.  American football is played with the oval-shaped ball pictured above.  One nickname for a football is “the pigskin.”  I am not sure why (I started to say maybe it was made of pigskin, but then I remembered that the darn thing is leather, which usually comes from cows, so why wouldn’t its nickname be “the cowhide”?) but I will find out and talk about it one day.

Football is played upon a flat field 100 yards in length, not counting the green space behind each of the two end lines, which are also called goal lines.  The green space behind each of the two end lines is called “the end zone.”

The field at Gillette Stadium, photo by Bernard Gagnon

There are two teams, and each team is assigned a goal line to protect. The object of the game is for one team to take the football across the other team’s goal line. When a team member is able to do that, either by running the ball over the line, or catching the ball past the line in the green, unmarked space, that is called a touchdown. A touchdown is worth 6 points. After the touchdown, the team that scored the touchdown can choose either to kick the ball through the goal post, which is called the point after kick, worth 1 point, or to run or throw the ball into the end zone. If the team is successful in that attempt, then it receives 2 points. Most announcers will use the phrase “going for 2″ if a team does that. When a team has the football and is moving down the field, it is considered to be on offense.   The team that is trying to stop the ball from being moved is on defense.

The football going through goal posts, from Print Shop Professional 2.0.

The team that scores the most points in the 60 minutes of playing time allotted to each game wins.  Those 60 minutes are divided into 4 separate periods of time of 15 minutes each, called quarters.

Not this kind of quarter.....

But this kind of quarter.

After two quarters, there is a break, which is called half-time.  It is 12 minutes long in a professional football game, but 20 minutes in a college football game. The coaches and players use half-time to rest just a little and go over changes to the way they are playing the game.  These changes are called “adjustments.”  Spectators use half-time to get refreshments and take care of other necessary errands, whether viewing the game at the stadium or on the TV.

Now, some of you who have been aware of football for years but not really paid attention are now doing the math and realizing that a televised football game usually lasts 3 hours, not 72 minutes as one might think, given the 60 minutes of play with a 12 minute half-time.  That is because the 60 minutes is only used up in actual playing time.  When a play is finished, in certain circumstances, the officials stop the clock and allow the teams to get lined up at the new ball position.  Some penalties can stop the clock, and a score always stops the clock long enough to allow television to run commercials as well as to allow the team that scored the points to kick the ball to the other team.  (We will cover the complete kicking game another time.)  Once the officials are ready for play to resume, then the clock starts again.

I think that is enough for now, don’t you?  Stay tuned next week, when we will discuss the rule of four, four downs that is.  We might even work in a general overview of offensive units, defensive units, and special teams.  Here’s hoping until then that you get a chance to watch at least one game.

Have a great week!

Nancy