Touchdown Travel: Football Five Pack

Article by: Robert Reid, September 2007

On 2005's first Sunday without American football, author Hunter S Thompson put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. His suicide note, mailed a few days earlier, was entitled 'Football Season is Over'. Welcome to football country, where life without it brings emptiness and ennui, and devotion to team outweighs god and country - and, in some cases, law. Note the story of a Texas Longhorns fan who walked into an Oklahoma Sooners bar wearing a 'Texas' t-shirt and a church deacon nearly tore off his scrotum (60 stitches later, all parts were accounted for).

Note the story of a Texas Longhorns fan who walked into an Oklahoma Sooners bar wearing a 'Texas' t-shirt and a church deacon nearly tore off his scrotum

Some first-time observers who are used to European football's steady action are frustrated by American football's stop-and-start play - the milling about, coaching adjustments, penalties, and then the wham-bam 'three yards and a cloud of dust' play that's over before you realise it's started. But we Americans love it for that. Fans at stadiums and sports bars fill the time between plays by calling out what to do next (as if anyone can hear) – 'Naked bootleg!' 'Run the post!' 'Double reverse!'– then have the immediate satisfaction of seeing if the coach is a true master of the gridiron, or just another 'dumb overpaid a-hole.'

Life-long Oklahoma fan, author Robert Reid

Surprising to some non-Americans, football has actually been bigger than baseball for over 30 years, perhaps because it's more violent and each game is more meaningful. Pro baseball teams play 162 games a year while pro football's season is a tense 16 games. Games are weekly, with enough building story lines to make the fake-cannon boom at opening kickoff feel like Christmas morning. It's even more so for the 119 top-tier college teams, who play just 11 or 12 games with no play-offs at season's end, meaning championship hopes are predicated on weird polls and staying undefeated. One loss and the dream is often over.

The 32-team National Football League (NFL) has been riddled by scandal this off-season (star pro quarterback Michael Vick faces jail time after confessing to dog fighting) but is nevertheless sky-high in popularity. The season is capped with the Super Bowl in February, which pairs off the winners of two conferences, following a single-elimination 12-team playoff. It draws up to 100 million viewers too, for its ads and acrobatic half-time shows that have featured Prince, the Stones and, following a 'wardrobe malfunction', Janet Jackson's bared breast.

Oklahoma sends out a tiny pony-led wagon on the field after scores

Nowhere in the US do passions run deeper (or scrotum-cuts wider) than around the wonderful, irrational world of NCAA (college) football – particularly feverish in the Deep South. Foreign sports fans used to traditions, like those long scarves and rah-rah chants at European football or Aussie-rules games, will feel more at home with the often looser college game. Here you get marching band-driven 'fight songs,' cute dated uniforms (Penn State's blank-white helmet with blue stripe), dopey mascots (Georgia's namesake bulldog, Uga, who often vomits), and endless bizarre customs (Oklahoma sends out a tiny pony-led wagon on the field after scores). The season winds up in an archaic, but profitable coalition of one-stop 'bowl games' – which are great fun and named ridiculously: eg the FedEx Orange Bowl, the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl, or (my favorite) the PapaJohns.com Bowl.

The end of the season is still a long way off though, giving much time to boast and bitch and predict and debate fiery topics like whether west-coast college teams can play with teams based in the old Confederacy, or which week NFL star Terrell Owens will divide the Dallas Cowboys locker room by whining about the coach or quarterback. Rowdy sports pages are merciless with individual errors – the New York tabloids are particularly brutal with the New York Giants – but you can get involved in the irresistible and widely attended chat rooms, such as the catch-all www.sportingnews.com.

Just like Nick Hornby wrote of water-cooler discussions and mid-day sports daydreams in his love letter to Arsenal, Fever Pitch: 'For alarming chunks of an average day, I am a moron.'

It's just part of the healing process, innit? Football is back.