Beyond Football and NFL...towards Sports

So I saw my first Super Bowl match today. To be more precise, I saw the Super Bowl XLIX featuring New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks. 

These past couple of months, one of my friends’ been coaching me about the American football or, as I prefer to call it, the NFL. I have learnt a lot of aspects about the sport in these past two months, from technicalities to the rules, regulations, and positions. I have to admit, it wasn’t easy initially given, I had – and still do – spent all my life watching European football. But piqued interest gave way to understanding of the sport and the fan following it had in a country, seven seas across from mine. 
 

The rules still flummox me for I continue to correlate the European interpretation of the sport to the Americanised version. The concept of a totally offensive line-up vis-à-vis a completely defensive one is novel considering that in European football, one doesn’t get to see a team full of wingers and strikers lining up against a team full of centre-backs and half-backs, sweepers and full-backs. 

The name is also a misnomer, with the players mostly not kicking the ball around but trying to pass it through the opposing team’s defence holding to secure a touchdown to score points. But it isn’t easy as it sounds. The offence has to be extremely good, the passing of the ball – which is referred to as throwing – needs to be adroit and the players need to have a good pair of feet to get their respective jobs done efficiently. 

If paused to consider from this angle, it is much similar to European football. The offence dictates the game in both sports; only in NFL, the offensive positions are referred to as quarter-back, wide receiver, running back, tackle, guard and centre. The names do sound odd when one first hears them – especially the one about quarter-back, but there’s nothing odd about the way they take control of the game. 

The quarter-back is the back-bone of any team’s offensive line-up. He has to have a good arm to throw the ball to the wide receiver and he needs to have a sprightly pair of legs to run through all the hefty defensive athletes whose main purpose, standing at the other end, is to tackle him and take the ball away from him.

The contest thus gets pretty even. The defensive line-up, which consists of linebackers, cornerbacks, tackle, end and safety, thus cannot afford to be mediocre. And unlike in European football, it’s thus not the team composition and the formation that matters, but rather the effectuality of the team’s line-up – in whichever formation it may be – that makes the difference in the match. 

In the final, New England Patriots were trailing by 10 points in the final moments of the game before their quarter-back Tom Brady – NFL legend so to speak – came up with a truly match winning performance to secure a 28-24 win for them. He was acknowledged as the MVP – in non-American colloquial, as the man-of-the-match – for his inspiring contribution and, it’s one more facet that isn’t dissimilar to European football. 

The bottom-line however, irrespective of my continual references to similarities and dissimilarities between the two genres isn’t to come up with a ‘spot-the-difference’ quiz. But rather, to emphasise on the fact that American football is a sport that’s grossly underrated outside the domain where it has a legion of fandom. There are many who mock the sport for its existence and continual thriving despite not knowing much about it, as there are many who, while having some idea about it, don’t care much to explore and widen their knowledge. 

But then if one is truly a sports fan, one can’t really choose which sport to follow and which to let go. A sport, at the end of the day, is just that. There are no two ways about it. If one really wishes to develop an interest in a sport, one needs to have an open mind about the rest as well.