Try Something New

"As your mother tells you, and my mother certainly told me, it is important, she always used to say, always to try new things"


This is the story of why I love the NFL, why it's become one of my favourite sports and why I think all sports fans should give it a go.


I'm a massive sports fan.  Now, I realise phrases like that get banded around far too much.  "Meet my friend, he's a massive cricket fan", you then meet the friend and find out he occasionally watches Twenty20, but can't name more than a couple of England players. But I genuinely am a massive sports fan and have been since I was a small boy.
I love playing sports, attending sporting events and watching sport on TV.  


A few years ago I started watching the NFL.  There's no real story behind why. I just decided to give it a try. Fast forward a few years and it's become an addiction. But what's so special about the sport? Why do I watch it avidly, write about it and want other people to give it a try?  Here are 7 reasons:


1. The Games!
Pretty obvious, you can tub thump about any sport as much as you want, but if the on field product isn't up to much you're wasting your breath.  American Football is an exciting and fascinating sport to watch.  You find yourself marvelling at a whole host of skills on show - strength, agility, reflexes, timing, accuracy, speed.  More importantly, the action is exciting.  
I've heard plenty of people say they've tried watching the NFL for a bit and got bored.  But it's a sport that needs to be given more time.  Yes, there are lots of rules and yes it does take time to work out what's going on, but trust me it's worth the investment.
I'll be going into more details about the actual games in future articles, but for now I want to focus on other elements of the sport.


2. Parity
Fed up of the same teams winning the trophies?  Had enough of teams buying their way to success?  Or maybe you just want to support a team that has a chance of winning a title! If so, then the NFL is the place to be.  
The League is structured to ensure a level playing field.  The weaker teams get to pick the best new players the following season.  All teams have the same squad size and wage budget.  Even the fixture schedules are put together with fairness in mind.  
I recently wrote an article for the excellent 1amsports.com, in which I tried to predict the results of the 16 games taking place in Week 1 of the 2012 season (Early Sept).  I found that only 2 of the match ups had clear favourites.  In the 14 other games, I could make a strong case for either side winning.  It's a similar story throughout the season, NFL matches are extremely tough to predict and often have very close finishes.


3.  Media Coverage
NFL Gamepass enables fans to watch all of their teams matches throughout the season.  In fact it enables them to watch any match they want at any time.  Gamepass costs about £180 a season (2012 price tbc) and has plenty of other features that you can watch either on your computer or stream onto your TV.
Away from the games, there are a number of excellent websites, podcasts and tv shows that offer high quality analysis of the sport.  As a new fan, I've found this invaluable in building up my knowledge of the sport.
Now I have a greater depth of knowledge of the sport I find the more technical analysis excellent in expanding my appreciation of the sport.
Certainly I've found the NFL to have the most intelligent and comprehensive media coverage of any sport I've followed.


4.  The Draft

Every year, the best players leaving the US college system join the NFL.  These are the most talented young American Footballers around and almost all NFL players arrive via this college system.  As I mentioned above, the teams pick in reverse order of their ranking for the previous season (ie the worst team have the 1st, 33rd, 65th etc pick) so it allows for the weaker teams to strengthen their squads.
The Draft is a massively popular event with NFL fans - it receives months of hype and speculation.  Every expert (and non expert!) will offer their opinions on the Draft and have a go at completing their own Mock Draft.  


5. Fantasy Football
I've previously talked about Fantasy Football (HERE).  Quite simply, NFL Fantasy Football is streets ahead of round ball Fantasy Football.  NFL Fantasy Football is a massive industry, the level of coverage almost rivals that of the real thing and fantasy advice is available from a wide amount of sources.
When it comes to actually playing the game, Fantasy Leagues are far more advanced than their "soccer" counterparts.  League formats can vary but in most of them you Draft your team so each player can only be owned by one fantasy player.  you then play a 1v1 match-up against another member of your league each week (Usually 10 teams per league but this can vary) until for the final 3 weeks of the regular season the top 4 teams are involved in the knockout playoffs.
It's a great game to play and the 1v1 element means that you can follow your teams progress whilst the game are being played.  
All in all, playing Fantasy Football is a great compliment to watching the NFL.


6. It's the Best Players all in one place
The NFL is the number one American Football league in the world and it's not even close.  As such, you get to see the best players compete on the a regular basis.  There's no chance that some of the top players play outside of the NFL - so you get to see the best in the world every week.


7.  Going to a match
The experience of going to an NFL game compares favorably with most other sports.  I've been to a lot of different sporting events and I'd only rank the football World Cup ahead of the NFL in terms of match day experience.  
Luckily for UK fans, we have an annual game at Wembley to enjoy.  Again, I'm going to go into more detail on this at a later date, in fact my very next article will be an account of a day at the International Series game in 2011.




I'm not expecting any non NFL fans to read this and immediately convert to the sport, but I just wanted to give you a flavour of why I love the sport.  


Over the next few weeks, I'm going to write about various elements of the sport, as well as looking at my personal experiences of the NFL.  It'd be great if some non NFL fans took the time to have a read and see what all the fuss is about, after all... there aren't that many ad breaks!


(The quote at the top of this article is the last line from which 2001 film?)