My favorite time of the year is just around the corner and I couldn't be more excited. No, it's not because of the cute boots or pumpkin spice flavored everything. There is only one reason I love fall so much: football. Yes, you heard me correctly. I watch football every Sunday, Monday, and Thursday that it’s on, I have multiple fantasy teams, and I can keep a conversation about football going for hours packed with information and statistics. I’ve always loved football and I think that it went hand in hand with my love for cheerleading. I was a cheerleader for most of my life, and I have to say I would cringe quite often when the other team would score and the girls I cheered with started cheering. Or when we would start doing a defense chant while our team was actually on offense. My dad always said that you can’t cheer for something you don’t understand.

Never did he say you'll never understand it, but you can cheer.

The vast majority of Americans believe women have no place in football. Football has always been played by men, for men, and thus, naturally seen as a masculine sport. But just because a sport is labeled as masculine doesn’t mean women can’t enjoy it too. Whenever I overhear men talking about football at school or work and start to chime in on the conversation, they always seem so shocked that I actually know what I’m talking about. The conversation quickly turns into a football trivia session to see what the extent of my knowledge is. Almost every guy I talk to acts like they’ve never heard a female talk in depth about football before, and while it’s not the most common thing for women to talk about, I know for a fact I’m not even close to the only one who has extensive knowledge of the sport.

Though I can’t put all the blame on them for their opinions about females and football, the media hasn’t helped much.

Within the last decade, sports networks such as ESPN and NFL Network have tried to move in a more progressive direction by adding females to their staff. You can tune into any major sports network and find a female sitting amongst the men discussing sports. The only problem is they aren’t really the ones discussing. They’ve been put in charge of certain segments of the show that don’t have much to do with in depth opinions on football. You will most likely find them reporting social media trends, or asking questions about football so the men who are “more qualified” to form educational opinions on the players and the games can answer them. A pretty girl in makeup and heels reporting social media on NFL Network is not the same thing as a female reporter going in depth about her opinions on the game. It’s great that they recognize women should have a place on major sports networks, but based on the jobs those women have been assigned to, I’m not convinced their opinions about females in football have changed much at all. The message I get from watching those networks seem to say women can scratch the surface when it comes to football, but when you want to have an intellectual conversation or debate about it, you’ll need a man to do the job. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a woman analyze a play or pick apart the errors made in a football game on national TV and I think that needs to change. But I know the argument against that will be that women have not played professional football and therefore cannot be experts on the subject, gee, maybe that’s something we should change too, but I think that conversation is for a different day. There is a brighter side: the first full-time female coach in the NFL was hired by the Buffalo Bills this year. However, it’s 2016. We are taking very slow steps in the right direction and it took us entirely too long to get here. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take another 2000 years to allow women to take another step forward in the football world.

Though men and media seem to form opinions about women in football, as women, we need to help our own case as well. Don’t do society any favors by falling into the stereotypes they’ve set for you. Instead of cheering for something you don't understand, understand what you're cheering for.

Go Eagles!