Hacking the grid #1

FHM’s resident NFL enthusiast unravels the mysteries of gridiron/American football so that he isn’t the only Saffer who wakes up at 1am to watch the Superbowl in February...

So here we are, just about three months from kickoff and living in the hope that the freshly drafted rookies are gonna provide that spark which every team – besides the Superbowl champion Pittsburg Steelers – missed last season. And what a season it was. Two rookie quarterbacks led their teams to the playoffs and one even went all the way to the conference championship game. And then there was the Superbowl...

The Steelers went into the game chasing their seventh Vince Lombardi trophy as the most successful in NFL history against the Arizona Cardinals, who were reaching the climax of a truly Cinderella-esque season. On one side, a maturing quarterback (Ben Roethlisberger) trying to win his second championship ring and prove his critics wrong. On the other, an ageing quarterback (Kurt Warner) trying to prove his worth. And then, with the game balancing on a knife’s edge, the dying moments of the game coughed up a spectacular moment to cap a game-winning Steelers drive. Ben Roethlisberger put up a deep-right pass into the endzone, complete to an outstretched Santonio Holmes who magically kept his toes in goal for a touchdown and sent FHM into a Crème Soda spilling frenzy!

And that, dear readers is the magic of the NFL. To paraphrase and Al Pacino character: It’s a game full of inches, where players have to fight for every advantage.

Birds of a feather
To a South African viewer, gridiron is a tedious affair with play stopping after every play and different teams of players coming on for different situations. Then you get the timeouts and endless commercials during the game. It’s just not as free-flowing and exciting as rugby. We hear you thinking it: “And the moffies also wear pads! What real man goes onto the field with pads? In rugby, we take the hits and get up, just like that. And we don’t stop to catch our breath, we run our opponents into the ground!” Well, er... we’re not trying to say which one is better. If you haven’t checked this already, this video should provide some food for the rugby-versus-gridiron thought:

 

As you can see, there isn’t any difference in the intensity of the two games. It is even obvious that both games probably share a common ancestor from early Britain. So let’s just agree to disagree on that one.

Gridiron 101
To fully understand the complex nuances of this technically advanced sport, you need to imagine a war situation where territory is the name of the game. Two opponents line up at the trenches and the offence try to either buy enough time to launch an aerial assault (a forward pass to a wide receiver) or a concentrated ground assault (a handoff to a running back or a scramble by the quarterback). The defense tries to either simply disrupt the timing of the play or go after the ball carrier and force the opponent backwards. A typical lineup at the line off scrimmage is as follows:

Offence is in blue and defence in red. We will be covering the different field positions next week.

Down to business
• Each game in the NFL is divided into four quarters of 15mins each with a twelve-minute interval between the second and third quarters.
• The ball is put into play at the beginning of each half (first and third quarter) by a kickoff.
• The receiving team tries to advance the ball as far up field as possible before the ball carrier is taken to ground.
• The line of scrimmage is called at the yard marker spot the ball carriers’ knee made contact with the ground.
• The advantage line is marked ten yards ahead of the line of scrimmage and the offence gets four attempts – called “downs” – to carry the ball over the advantage line by either running with ball in hand or making a completed forward pass.
• The line of scrimmage will move as the ball carriers are brought to ground, but the advantage line only moves once it is crossed.
• If the offence manage to cross the advantage line, they get another set of four downs. If not’ they will either punt the ball down field with their fourth down and force their opponents to backwards, or the ball gets turned over to the opposing team. *As the Hacking the grid series unfolds every Wednesday, we’ll look at the various situations in more detail.

What's the score?
The scoring system in gridiron is very similar to rugby union where a converted touchdown (when one team carries the ball over the opposing goal line) counts seven points – six points for a touchdown and one point for a kicked conversion. But teams are given the option to go for a two-point conversion by carrying the ball over the goal line again – this gives a combined total of eight points for the touchdown and two-point conversion. Apart from that, teams can attempt to kick field goals at any time – field goals count three points.

Another method is to force a “safety”. A safety is scored when the defending team forces the offensive team to cross their own dead ball line or ground the ball in the in-goal area (the endzone).



The defense scores two points for this and the offence must then punt away possession with a free kick.

That’s all for now sportsfans, log on next week for a comprehensive guide to gridiron offensive positions.