Schoolies Day 20 - American Football is Weird

ok, before we get to the weirdness of American Football, I want to do a shout out to the New Jersey Transit Authority who made it super easy to get to the game at MetLife Stadium this afternoon - seriously easy and relatively inexpensive. Hats off at the end of the game that we were home smoothly as well, with little to no hassle!

Now as for the football, I have to say that American Football is pretty hyped.  Super impressive stadium (80k+ capacity) where even the cheap seats are good seats. Huge tailgate parties in the parking lot, and activities all round the stadium pre-game.  There are the obligatory New York Jets flight crew (cheer leaders) the fans are called Jets Nation and there is always some gimmicky thing in the crowd like T-shirt cannons and tossing into the crowd, super fans who lead chants like J-E-T-S, JETS, JETS, JETS, or De-fense (clap clap) a really annoying air raid siren that just goes on and on and on all game.

And then there is the football.  I read an ESPN article before the game that said the average action time for games had dropped to 11 minutes this year. Now let’s get this straight.  They play for 4 x 15 minute quarters.  That’s an hour of actual play.  Only 11 minutes of it is “action”.  And it takes 4 HOURS TO FINISH!

I can watch pretty much any sport, hell on this trip I went to a Premier League soccer match and enjoyed it.  But this is not something I will replicate again.  The constant stop-start of this game is frustrating.  The standing around waiting while a countdown clock advises you that there is a 2 minute tv break, the changeover of teams because heaven forbid you can play both offence and defence (don’t get me started on the specials).

But the Americans love it.  I imagine they would diss my footy if they came to watch it, but at least with our stoppages we add the time at the end and the action is pretty much ongoing all game.  I spent more time watching the crowd than I did the game - because the game doesn’t play constantly for the quarter.  I mean, I timed the last 7.06 of the final quarter and it took 40 minutes to play - OMG!

Anyway, it came down to a nail biting finish.  The Jets kicked a field goal with seconds to spare to tie the game and force the game into ten minutes overtime (kill me now!).  Thankfully it’s similar to golden point so first scorer wins.  Sadly today that was the Packers so it wasn’t a good day for Jets fans.  If you ask the fans, they were robbed - there were certainly a lot of penalty flags thrown and there was one questionable touchdown awarded (there is no review system for touchdowns).  I was pretty surprised that the only ‘big hits’ we saw were all penalised and interference penalties were awarded a lot too.  It must be a real difference when our footy players come here as specialised punt kickers - to go from our game to this - it is certainly not what I expected!

Anyway, tick that box off, I’m done!