OFL

"A game that can keep you young and vibrant and all steamed up is a precious thing"
-W.W. "Pudge" Heffelfinger, Yale lineman, (and first ever pro player)

American Football, in all its forms, has been the most popular sport in America for over one hundred years. While professional baseball captured the collective American heart for much of the twentieth century, football at the high school, college, and eventually the professional level ultimately dominated American sports. Friday night high school games remain huge events in many American towns, as they have been for a century; college games were drawing crowds of 100,000 before Babe Ruth took his first professional swing of a bat, and the NFL remains the most followed league in the nation.

The reasons are obvious. It is a grand game and at its best has a sense of drama and theatre that no other sport on earth can match.

That said, the drama of football is much more fun if you know what's going on. I have found that most folks who don't know the game are utterly baffled about what they're watching. "Why does one team have the ball and then, seemingly randomly, the other team has the ball?"; "Why do they throw the ball sometimes but not all the time?"

So what follows is an extremely basic (and probably overly dry) explanation of how American football works for those who've never played but might like to.