This week was probably the busiest week in the US as the Super Bowl was kicked off last night in the Sun Life Stadium, Miami. Super Bowl XLIV, the 44th, is a Super Bowl currently being played and pitting the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Indianapolis Colts against the National Football Conference (NFC) champion New Orleans Saints to decide the National Football League (NFL) champion for the 2009 season. The game's kickoff took place at 6:28 p.m. EST (23:28 UTC) last night on February 7, 2010 features the Saints' first Super Bowl appearance since their founding in 1967, while it is the fourth time a Colts franchise team has appeared, since their founding in 1953 as the Baltimore Colts. In their three previous Super Bowl appearances, all also in Miami, the Baltimore/Indianapolis Colts have lost once in 1969 and won twice in 1971 and 2007.The Saints enter the game with a 13-3 record for the 2009 regular season, compared to the Colts' 14-2 record. In the playoff games, both teams had a 1st round bye. The Colts entered the Super Bowl off of 20–3 and 30–17 victories, while the Saints advanced with scores of 45–14 and 31–28 (in overtime), defeating last year's runners up the Arizona Cardinals in their first game. The Pittsburgh Steelers, as defending champions, failed to make the playoffs based on tiebreakers. It is the first time since Super Bowl XXVIII (16 years previously) that both number one seeds have reached the Super Bowl. The Saints' head coach is Sean Payton, having joined from the Dallas Cowboys in 2006, while his opposing head coach Jim Caldwell was appointed the Colts head coach in 2009 having joined them in 2002 as assistant head coach.
It is the tenth time the Super Bowl has been held in Miami at the home stadium of the Miami Dolphins, the fifth time being held in the Sun Life Stadium, and five more before those in the Dolphins' now demolished former home, the Miami Orange Bowl. Per convention as an even numbered Super Bowl, the Colts as the AFC representatives have the home team designation, wearing blue jerseys with white pants, while the Saints (who wore their white jerseys in several home games this year) will wear white jerseys with gold pants. The game was broadcast live on CBS, and the half-time show was feature the English rock band The Who.Carrie Underwood sang the National Anthem and Queen Latifah sang "America the Beautiful." Underwood's selection marks the third straight year that an alumnus of American Idol has been chosen to perform the Star Spangled Banner, joining Jordin Sparks at Super Bowl XLII and Jennifer Hudson a year later. Translation of both songs into American Sign Language will be provided by Kinesha Battles, a student at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2010, led by Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith, participated in the pre-game coin toss. The rest of the class - Rickey Jackson, Dick LeBeau, Floyd Little, Russ Grimm and John Randle - were named the day before.
American football, known in the United States simply as football and often as gridiron or tackle football outside the United States, is a competitive team sport known for combining strategy with physical play. The objective of the game is to score points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. The ball can be advanced by carrying it (a running play) or by throwing it to a teammate (a passing play). Points can be scored in a variety of ways, including carrying the ball over the opponent's goal line, catching a pass thrown over that goal line, kicking the ball through the goal posts at the opponent's end zone, or tackling an opposing ball carrier within his end zone. The winner is the team with the most points when the time expires. American football is closely related to Canadian football, but with significant differences.
In the United States, the major forms are high school football, college football and professional football, which are essentially similar but feature slightly different rules. High school football is governed in the U.S. by the National Federation of State High School Associations. College football is governed in the U.S. by two bodies; the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. The major league for professional football is the National Football League. Over the years, there have been other notable professional football leagues, including the All America Football Conference during the 1940s, the American Football League during the 1960s, the United States Football League during the 1980s, and the currently active United Football League.
Primitive forms of rugby, then all covered by the name "football", were being played in the USA as far back as 1830 at Georgetown University and the 1840s, at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, stemming partly from Americans who had been educated in English schools. The history of American football can be traced to early versions of rugby football and association football. Both games have their origins in varieties of football played in the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century, in which a ball is kicked at a goal and/or run over a line.
Now here is the thing, I was never in to American football what so ever. Seriously, I don't get the game at all. A bunch of big guys with padding everywhere running around chasing a ball and hit each other, what so fun about that? Don't get me wrong, but for me that game is not manly enough. Come on, men wearing padding? It's a sport, man...let yourself got cuts and injuries for God sake! You are not doing any extreme sport like jumping down the hills 200 miles an hour or anything! It's only collision between you and other guys! What would you get? Cuts? Brushes? Deal with it! But what can I say, am not American so I will never get to understand their game as much as most of my American friends said that football, or in this case 'soccer', is a stupid game. Yeah, different country, different game, different type of excitement, right?
Maybe American football is a collision sport.And to stop the offense from advancing the ball, the defense must tackle the player with the ball by knocking or pulling him down. As such, defensive players must use some form of physical contact to bring the ball-carrier to the ground, within certain rules and guidelines. Tacklers cannot kick or punch the runner. They also cannot grab the face mask of the runner's helmet or lead into a tackle with their own helmet. Despite these and other rules regarding unnecessary roughness, most other forms of tackling are legal. Blockers and defenders trying to evade them also have wide leeway in trying to force their opponents out of the way. Quarterbacks are regularly hit by defenders coming on full speed from outside the quarterback's field of vision. This is commonly known as a blindside.
To compensate for this, players must wear special protective equipment, such as a padded plastic helmet, shoulder pads, hip pads and knee pads. These protective pads were introduced decades ago and have improved ever since to help minimize lasting injury to players. An unintended consequence of all the safety equipment has resulted in increasing levels of violence in the game. Players may now hurl themselves at one another at high speeds without a significant chance of injury. The injuries that do result tend to be severe and often season or career-ending and sometimes fatal. In previous years with less padding, tackling more closely resembled tackles in Rugby football. Better helmets have allowed players to use their helmets as weapons. This form of tackling is particularly unwise, because of the great potential for brain or spinal injury. All this has caused the various leagues, especially the NFL, to implement a complicated series of penalties for various types of contact. Most recently, virtually any contact with the helmet of a defensive player on the quarterback, or any contact to the quarterback's head, is now a foul. During the late 1970s, the penalty in high school football for spearing included ejection from the game.
Despite protective equipment and rule changes to emphasize safety, injuries remain very common in football. It is increasingly rare, for example, for NFL quarterbacks or running backs (who take the most direct hits) to make it through an entire season without missing some time to injury. Additionally, 28 football players died from direct football injuries in the years 2000-05 and an additional 68 died indirectly from dehydration or other examples of "non-physical" dangers, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. Concussions are common, with about 41,000 suffered every year among high school players according to the Brain Injury Association of Arizona. In 1981, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who played football in high school, commented on the contact of the sport: [Football] is the last thing left in civilization where men can literally fling themselves bodily at one another in combat and not be at war."
Extra and optional equipment such as neck rolls, spider pads, rib protectors (referred to as "flak jackets"), and elbow pads help against injury as well, though they do not tend to be used by the majority of players due to their lack of requirement.
The danger of football and the equipment required to reduce it make regulation football impractical for casual play. Flag football and touch football are less violent variants of the game popular among recreational players.
American football resulted from several major divergences from rugby football, most notably the rule changes instituted by Walter Camp, considered the "Father of American Football". Among these important changes were the introduction of the line of scrimmage and of down-and-distance rules. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, game play developments by college coaches such as Eddie Cochems, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Knute Rockne, and Glenn "Pop" Warner helped take advantage of the newly introduced forward pass.
The popularity of collegiate football grew as it became the dominant version of the sport for the first half of the twentieth century. Bowl games, a college football tradition, attracted a national audience for collegiate teams. Bolstered by fierce rivalries, college football still holds widespread appeal in the US. The origin of professional football can be traced back to 1892, with William "Pudge" Heffelfinger's $500 contract to play in a game for the Allegheny Athletic Association against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. The first Professional "league" was the Ohio League, formed in 1903, and the first Professional Football championship game was between the Buffalo Prospects and the Canton Bulldogs in 1919. In 1920, the American Professional Football Association was formed. The first game was played in Dayton, Ohio on October 3, 1920 with the host Triangles defeating the Columbus Panhandles 14–0. The league changed its name to the National Football League (NFL) two years later, and eventually became the major league of American football. Initially a sport of Midwestern industrial towns in the United States, professional football eventually became a national phenomenon. Football's increasing popularity is usually traced to the 1958 NFL Championship Game, a contest that has been dubbed the "Greatest Game Ever Played". A rival league to the NFL, the American Football League (AFL), began play in 1960; the pressure it put on the senior league led to a merger between the two leagues and the creation of the Super Bowl, which has become the most watched television event in the United States on an annual basis.
As a sports fan, I can see where all of these things came from. The excitement when you watch your team playing was indescribable. The adrenaline was top range. So I can totally accepting all of those guys who wear silly costumes, painted themselves with their team's color paint, hey guys...am with you! WHO DAT???
^_^
