Making Sense of American Football

When you are talking about sports and you need an audience, this is what you should do: don't call me, Olujay. I may not answer you. Why? Well, I am simply not much of a sports person. The only kind of sport on which you may outright disagree with me is chess. It's considered a sport, so you may still refer to me as a sportsperson. Today, contrary to the just-given impression, I want to make you my audience on this topic of mine on sports.

You see, I believe the world is complex enough, and we really do not need any more confusion. Lately, there has been a rampant rise in controversial topics on things that really need not be anything other than simple. But, you know, when we think about ourselves as humans, it is apparent that we are fundamentally complex in nature; hence, we tend to respond in a similar manner.

Growing up in my country, one sport that always brings guys together is football. You'd see men boys troop out in their numbers at any slight chance they get to play football with one another. I join in sometimes when my spirit is high and I am in the mood. And then everyone would have a blast, either playing or spectating.

When I think about American football and how it's played, I cannot help but wonder what kind of sport it is and how people would actually want to play such a game.

Football, as I knew it where I came from, was, well, played with feet. That is, a person would use a foot to kick the ball all around the field with the aim of scoring goals. American footballers, however, wore helmets and shoulder pads, never kicked as much as I expected, and seemed more like Shaolin kung fu. _{Okay. Not really...}

The name—yes, the name—is one part of this sport that I do not get. I mean, why not call it handball, because they literally hold this ball for most of the game or throw it? Or what about runball? Or some name that depicts its apparent nature. The ovoid ball can't even be played with feet like soccer.

I don't know how it plays, really, and that's because that is yet another part of the game that I do not get. I have tried to learn about it, but the terminologies seem even harder than the math I learned back in school. Maybe it's because I never played the game, paid much attention to it, or lived in an environment where they played it.

To me, the rules are very complex, and there are various penalties and regulations that can be challenging for new players to grasp. On top of that, to be so violently physical for most of the game

The players are all equipped with so much gear for protection, like helmets, shoulder pads, and the like. Clearly, it's all because it gets pretty rough at times in the game. People lose their teeth, as I have often seen in the movies. So why play this game? Why even create it in the first place?

And then, a man's got to have speed as well as agility. That's pretty important for sports, generally, but all that throwing a ball through a goalpost while risking injuries, all within 15 minutes per quarter, is quite the hassle for fun and competition.

It's a game that requires high levels of resilience, strength, grit, and aggressiveness most of the time, but I consider it a generally dangerous game. I don't exactly see the fun in it. But then again, the actual people that own this game see it differently, and I clearly see it the way I do because I am not from around there. All the same, I don't get it very much. Thank you for making sense of it with me.