There aren't THAT many adverts!

So I've got my team to support and I've got my 30 Things to Do, but I want to do more than that. I want to spread the word about how much fun the NFL is and what a great league it is to follow.

One of the most popular recent threads on the nfluk forum is entitled "The mindless idiots who slag off American Football".  Whilst the title of the thread is a tad harsh, the content is a selection of comments people have heard from the many people who don't watch the NFL.  "Too slow", "Too many adverts", "Why do they wear pads", "Too complicated" are just some of the many, many comments on there.
To be honest, I would have been saying plenty of them myself a few years ago.  The NFL looked like a pretty stupid, over hyped, complicated and disjointed sport.  I didn't understand the rules and most of the time nothing was happening.

Luckily, I'm a) a complete sports geek and b) I'm a complete obsessive.  So for some reason, I gave the NFL a try and the rest is history.  But I want to reach out to people who don't like the sport and tell them what they're missing out on.  If you're an NFL fan reading this, I'm sure you know plenty of sceptics - people who switch off as soon as you mention the sport.

The NFL is growing at a rapid rate in the UK.  Sky viewing figures went up by 18% in 2011, the International Series has been a massive success and it'd be great for that growth to continue.  Clearly, there is a lot of great work going on to that effect - NFLUK do a great job of promoting the sport, as do the TV networks that cover the league (recent quibbles aside!), but as a fan I'd love to help that growth.  I'm not saying that I can convert the masses to the sport, but what I can do is share my experiences and knowledge of the sport to try and make it more accessible and appealing to those sceptics.

And how can I go about doing this?

Well, I don't want to be too preachy and I don't want to be too technical.  The bottom line is that the NFL is fun and it's important to convey that fun. So, I'm going to focus on both my experiences of the NFL and some of the elements of the league that are appealing.  For example, I'm currently thinking of writing articles on subjects such as:

- Reasons I grew to love the NFL
- A Day out at Wembley
- Parity in the League
- A Brief Guide to how the game works
- Articles on the various player positions
- A brief look at the 32 teams
- Season Preview
- Some other stuff I haven't thought of yet!

And that's all before the season even starts!

So, I'm going to carry on my 30 Things to Do (The Baby Gift Set has arrived!), but a lot of those "things" are either long term goals or only applicable once the season has started.  As such, I wanted another focus and hopefully this is that focus.  It'd be great if any NFL fans reading my future articles could forward/send/tweet/however else you do that kind of thing them on to non fans and sceptics.

You never know, I few more people might start liking the NFL!