This is a fair question to most of the people I talk too. I hear a lot of complaints about the NFL: "It's too complicated... It's too stop/start... the players are too padded..."
All this and more and I'm sure any NFL fans in the UK have encountered the same sort of thing when trying to discuss the game with new comers...
"It's too complicated" Sorry, not buying it. I was introduced to American football by watching on TV and then playing Video games. My other half, a woman who hates sport for the most part, was able to pick it up in one Scottish Claymores game (how we miss you!). Give it one game and you'll know enough to appreciate it. Give it one season and you'll know enough to love it.
"It's too stop/start" Yeah there's a lot of breaks: plays last on average about 4-5 seconds. But the potential for explosive plays or brutal defence is there throughout. Don't believe me? Check out our video page here for an example of the type of plays you can get in the NFL. You cannot keep up that level of intensity.
"Players are too padded" OK, go to our video page, there's a video called NFL Hardest hits of 2011/2012. Go watch it... Go on... I'll wait... You back, cool, still think they're too padded? Didn't think so.
So barring the fact that it's a fast, skilful game interspersed with some truly delicious brutality, what else keeps me enthralled by this game...
It's a whole different world over there and the layers just keep unravelling the more I learn. Want to know why the teams get sold out arenas of over 50000 people every week? Imagine if Manchester Untied played only 16 games in a season, only 8 of which are at home. Can you imagine how fervant the supporters of say, Newcastle United would be in that case.. and how expensive the tickets would be!!!
And the positions involved... imagine playing a game where you never see the ball... ever. That's the linemen who will maybe see the ball 5 or 6 times in a good career and usually only well then fall on a dropped ball. The Quarterback who is responsible for running the offence... there's no position like this in Soccer. He is the difference most of the time between a win and a loss. You can get by with bad players in other positions, not in QB.
Then there's aspects of the game outside of the NFL. There are high school football teams that consistently play in front of 18-20,000 fans. Can you imagine at 17 playing a sport in front of 20000 people!? Then you get head hunted for a full scholarship to University (college). Once there you play in front of tens of thousands of people... and it's televised for millions.
Then you have the draft where the 32 teams take it in turns to pick from the best 224 players at College level, potentially to be paid millions... And this is all before you get to the elite level of the NFL...
Over the weeks and months I'm going to be having a leyman's look at all of these aspects and learning about them for the people who make the effort to read. Would appreciate your feedback and questions, they will get answered on the podcast.
Stay with me folks, we going into, not the Twilight Zone... but the End zone!!
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