No, I'm the Dummy, Dummy!

There was a time when I, like many people, accepted the stereotype that football players are not very smart. No longer. Now that I am finally trying to learn the actual rules of the game, I have realized that football players can not possibly be stupid--it's just that once your brain is filled with the rules of football, there isn't any room for anything else.

This is not the first time in my life that I have attempted to learn the rules of football--wait, no, this is the first time that I've tried. But I was supposed to have been taught them in middle school, when for some reason it was decided that the eighth-grade girls should have a six-week football unit in PE. Our middle school (Eleanor J. Toll; go Titans) was built on a hill with the front of the school facing upwards. Behind the school and approximately one and a half stories below the entrance was our eating area, paved with asphalt, which was also on a slant and about forty feet wide. At the bottom of this was a steep incline onto another asphalt area which we used for PE, to play sports like volleyball, basketball, and for a brief, strange time, tennis. And finally, below the asphalt game courts was one last ramp down to a large grass field which we would use for soccer and track and field events. And once and once only in the history of EJT Middle School, flag football. We were taught the rules and split into maybe eight teams, and sent down onto the soft grass to hit the gridiron.

That lasted for about a day, which was all it took for us to realize that our gym teachers were using our play time as an extended smoke break and would never follow us all the way down to the grass. So after that, I think about five of the eight teams decided that we weren't into getting dirty and elected two or three of our most coordinated members to throw the ball back and forth occasionally to give the semblance of activity. The rest of us convened immediately at the bottom of the ramp (in case a gym teacher did look down to make sure we were running around, she would be looking right over our heads), and probably played MASH or something. We didn't move around a lot, is all I remember.

Which is why I now have been reduced to checking out Football for Dummies: Howie Long Makes it Simple from my local library (subtitle added). Thank God Howie is making it simple, because I could not handle complicated. Here is a direct quote from the book:

“The offense has 40 seconds from the end of a given play, or a 25-second interval after official stoppages (such as replacing a wet ball with a dry one), to get in the proper position after an extremely long pass gain. If the offense doesn't snap the ball in that allotted time, it's penalized five yards and must repeat the down....With the exception of the last two minutes of the first half and the last five minutes of the second half of an NFL game, the game clock is restarted after a kickoff return, after a player goes out of bounds on a play, or after a declined penalty.”

Oh, of course. When do I light the acorn on fire?

But then Howie adds insult to injury on the very next page, by teaching us that

“Every football contest starts with a coin toss. Selected members from each team come to the center of the field, where the referee holds a coin....one player from the visiting team calls heads or tails, and that person must do so before the official tosses the coin into the air, hence the term coin toss.” (Emphasis Howie's.)

Hence. The term. COIN. TOSS. I don't know if I can handle this. This chapter is 25 pages long and it's harder to read than Deuteronomy, although the part about not putting eggs to close to a fire during the pre-season was an interesting bit of trivia.

Obviously, something like football is all about action and movement, and is difficult to break down into something that is interesting on the page. So in order to really understand the game, I went out and bought a copy of last year's Madden NFL for the Xbox, and I intend to learn by doing. Which is why I had to get this post written, because all of a sudden a holographic John Madden is trying to give me a personality test to see how much I know about football and if any more happens and I try to put it all into one blog entry it will quite possibly explode my brain.

So that's what's going on so far. And now if you'll excuse me, I have a paper bag around here somewhere that I'd like to breathe into for a while.