The Beginner’s Guide To American Football

It’s the most popular sport by far in the US – over 200 million people tune in to watch its grand final, the Super Bowl each February. And its organising body the NFL is committed to increasing its appeal globally. So to give you a chance to be ready for this here’s a beginner’s guide to all the aspects of the sport that you need to know to understand what’s happening on the field of play. 

It’s by no means comprehensive, there are far more complexities to discover that you can read about here – but this tell you all about the basics.

The rules of the game

Like most ball games like soccer and rugby the objective in American football, or gridiron as it’s sometimes called, is for one team to score more points than the other.

In the sport two teams of eleven players are competing against each other in games that last a total of 60 minutes and are divided into four quarters of fifteen minutes each.  If the scores are tied at the end of normal time the game goes into overtime until an eventual winner is determined. So, unlike other sports, there can be no such thing as a tie.

Scoring

There are four different ways that points can be scored in a game:

Touchdown: This is when a member of the attacking team crosses the goal line of the opposition with the ball and touches it on the ground or catches it while over the goal line. It scores six points.

Field Goal: If the offense manages to kick the ball through the upright posts and over the crossbar of the goal they score three points.

Extra point: There are one or two extra points on offer if the team that scored the touchdown can also kick the ball through the uprights after a touchdown. For two points the team needs to take the ball into the end-zone for a second time after the touchdown.

Safety: The defence can secure two points by tackling a member of the other team with the ball in their own end zone.

How the league works

The NFL includes 32 teams who are divided into two conferences, the American and the National Football Conference. These are then split into eight different divisions with four team in each.

The teams themselves consist of a squad of a maximum of 55 players with a maximum of 48 of them being eligible to play on any game day. The squad is split into offense and defence so a team will have eleven members of either one on the field at any one time, depending on the state of the game.

The leader of any team is generally the quarterback, an offensive player. This is the person who directs the run of play and who is responsible for feeding the ball forward to create scoring opportunities.

It tends to be the quarterbacks who get the most media and public attention so names like Patrick Mahomes, Tom Brady and Joe Montana are probably the most recognizable even for non-football fans.

The leading quarterbacks almost invariably play for the teams with the most favorable Super Bowl odds. That’s how very important they are to any team hoping to succeed.

Every off-season there is also the NFL draft. This is when each new generation of college footballers are available for selection by NFL teams. The franchises who have had the worst seasons get the right to choose first, the theory being that this will give them the pick of the new recruits and increase the team’s chances in future seasons.

There are seven rounds with each team getting a single pick each round – thus introducing a minimum of 224 new players, or rookies, each season.

The season

The regular NFL season runs from the Sunday after Labor Day and involves each team playing 17 matches ending in the week after New Year.

This is followed by the post season in which 14 teams are eventually whittled down to the two who will meet in the Super Bowl in early February. The winners of each of the four divisions of the two conferences, the AFC and the NFC automatically qualify, along with three wild card entries from each one. Then follows a series of knock-out rounds that sees the victorious teams from each conference facing off against each other in the final.

Over the 52 Super Bowls played to date the leading teams have been the New England Patriots and the Pittsburgh Steelers with six wins apiece. For the last two years the Kansas City Chiefs have been victorious – with hopes that they can make it a hat-trick this year.

So there you have it. A quick primer to the ins and outs of American football. The best way to get to grips with its many intricacies is to watch a game in action, and there’s no time like the present to start!