What Do You Know About Football? Part 2: American Football

The college level of America football is controlled by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and has three levels. College football is extremely popular in America, where the largest stadiums in college towns sell out routinely. The sport in generally strongly tied to the local communities, with tailgating (parties that occur in a parking lot of a stadium), cheerleaders, marching bands and homecomings playing an important part of the experience. The most people ever to attend a college football game was 114,000, for the Army-Navy game which ended in a 21-21 tie.

There are also several women’s American football leagues. The National Women's Football Association (NWFA) was formed in 2000, and now consists of 34 teams across the nation. The Independent Women's Football League (IWFL) was also formed in 2000 and currently consists of 40 teams nationwide.

The Levels

American football’s highest level is the NFL. The NFL has no promotion or development league; it gets its players from college or potentially from the Canadian Football League.

The Super Bowl which pits the best two teams in the NFL is generally considered the world championship.

Popularity and range

This code is the most popular code in the US, with Canada also showing interest in the sport along with Canadian Football. Generally the most watched and most followed sport in America is American Football.  Big games can get tens of millions of viewers, and the Super Bowl generally gets between 90-100 million viewers. The sport is also broadcast in many countries in Europe, South American and Asia, but unfortunately there hasn’t become an established fan base.

Outside the US, the game has been unpopular at the spectatorship level but has managed to create amateur leagues in over 50 countries worldwide. IFAF claims to represent “23 million athletes worldwide”. In the UK, 46 teams play in the British American Football League (BAFL). Hungary, Germany, Japan, France, Norway, New Zealand, Argentina, Italy and many other have American football leagues and are part of the IFAF.

American football has been present around the world for years, with the World League of American Football and NFL Europe both being closed down after years of loses. The current strategy at spreading the sport focuses at playing NFL regular season games in Europe. There was a game between the New York Giants and Miami Dolphins played in London that sold 40,000 tickets in 90 minutes, with only 10,000 of those request coming from America.

It should also be noted there has been an American Football World Cup since 1999, but has not generated the interest required to make it a big event like the association and rugby football World Cups. In addition, American football is not an Olympic sport, although there is a campaign to get the IOC to consider it as a demonstration sport.

The future of the sport

At its present rate, there are several large cities in America that don’t have a professional team; a good example would be Los Angeles.  Although there is no indication of expansion of the NFL into LA or other American cities like San Antonio in the short term, there still is the option of creating a team in these large cities. But even with this, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledges that the game’s
“future success will depend in large part on our ability to globalize”. While NFL Europe folded and attempts at growing the game around the world have largely left people bored and baffled, the sport has many options of transferring its excitement from home to the games abroad by hosting regular season games. Regular season games were hosted in both England and Mexico, and the Buffalo Bills have signed a contract to play one game a year in Toronto, Canada. In fact, Roger Goodell has said that in the future the NFL may host the Super bowl in London. All of these options are likely to be much better at getting a larger fan base then the past attempts at growing home-grown leagues that drew little excitement.

Online fantasy football has been a huge part the increase in the sports appeal over the recent years, with the sports statistical nature being the perfect sport for armchair coaches. The NFL entered into a reported five-year, $600 million deal in 2006 with Sprint that was driven at least in part because of fantasy sports, allowing subscribers to draft and monitor their teams with their cell phones. I would expect to see more integration between the broadcasts and fantasy elements. One interesting note is that management games for American football are almost non-existent, while fantasy pools remain popular. Also while the Madden series of games remains extremely popular in the nation, there is no alternative which may also change as Konami and other video game manufacturers enter the field.

Conclusion

So there you have it, our first venture into a code of football that has managed to capture the American public’s imagination and has a good future ahead. The sport is perhaps the perfect sport for those who imagine they are coaches while watching sport and want to strategize along with the play. The games start-stop nature allows individual plays to be carefully planned and choreographed, right down to the very last detail of where each player is meant to stand, go and what to do. The NFL playbook of each team contains pretty much every situation imaginable and can extend into hundreds of pages, giving our viewers a wealth of strategic options to choose from. Perhaps this chess-rugby duality which allows both warlike strategy of chess and brutality of rugby that has caused it to be the most dominant sport in America. It’s truly a completely unique game and once you learn all its intrincities, it will dawn on you just how great it can be:

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