It almost feels blasphemous to say it, since I live in the United States and attend a Big Ten school, but I’m not a football fan. I never have been. But my mother watches Packers games, and I attended football games as a member of my high school marching band, so I think I have a decent grasp of how it works and why some people find it so exciting.
So, from one non-football fan to another, this is how football works. I am explaining this without using Google; that would be cheating, and I assume it would render this article a lot less funny for actual football fans to read.
The field is 100 yards long (I know this because I marched on them). The ball is sort of oval-shaped, with pointy ends. It used to be made of pig skin but I don’t think they do that anymore. Each team is trying to get the ball to a specific end of the field. Getting the ball to one side of the field is called a touchdown; a touchdown is worth six points. After a touchdown, the team has the chance to kick the ball through the goalposts for an additional point. It is possible to get three points for a field goal, which I think means kicking the ball through the goalposts at some other time than immediately post-touchdown. Players have permission to tackle each other in order to stop the other team from getting touchdowns. This causes a lot of concussions despite the padding and helmets that football players wear.
Speaking of concussions, I think that part of football’s appeal is the violence. Humans have always enjoyed rough sports in large stadiums, but since actually killing people is generally frowned upon in modern U.S. society, we’ve left behind gladiator battles for big guys tackling each other. People get a vicarious thrill from other people doing dangerous stuff, and don’t actually have to do the dangerous thing themselves. The football players get a lot of money, so I guess everybody wins!
But football isn’t just about violence. Football fans, like all sports fans, tend to identify very strongly with their team. People cheer on football teams because then they feel like they belong with that team and its community of fans. They wear the uniforms and colors of their team, and sing songs and shout chants about their team, to show that they belong to this group (and for some reason this is more socially acceptable than dressing up like characters from movies or comic books and singing and shouting things about those characters. Don’t ask me why one is more accepted than the other; I’m still trying to figure that out). Families come together over football; in many cases, supporting a certain team is a family tradition, a chain as unbreakable as passing down the family business or last name.
Football fans feel happy when their team succeeds, and feel angry and upset when their teams do poorly (again, not sure why this is more acceptable than being happy when things go well for the characters of my favorite TV shows, or angry and upset when they don’t go well). Speaking of teams doing well, University of Iowa Hawkeye fans are super-excited right now because the team has won eleven games in a row this season (that’s what 11-0 means: eleven wins, zero losses), and they’ve never done this well in the history of Hawkeye football. And their success makes their fans feel good, too!
And I can see all of this as pretty cool, even though I’m not a part of it. It’s good to be enthusiastic about something. I may not be a football fan, but I’m a fan of enthusiasm.
