Football: Rules and Regulations

Some people say there’s no such thing as in good pain, but if you love football there is. Football is my favorite sport and even though it is demanding mentally and physically I would never spot playing it. The way football came to be was through another sport called rugby. Because of rugby, the Football Association in England was formed, becoming the sport's first governing body (profootballhof.com).

There are many rules when it comes to playing football and the actual rulebook is over one hundred pages long.

According to understandingamericanfootball.com, this is the rules and how football is played. Football is played on a rectangular field one hundred yards long x 160 yards wide, with a ten-foot-long area at each end called the end zone. There are two opposing teams of eleven players each, with each team having opposite halves of the football field as their territory. The coin toss - before the game begins, the referee and team captains get together for a good old-fashioned coin toss, with the visiting team calling heads or tails.

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The winner gets to choose either to have his team start the game with the ball in their possession (receiving the kickoff) or picking which end of the field he wants for his team's territory. The teams take turns at either being the Offense (having the ball in their possession and trying to score points) or the Defense (trying to stop the offense from scoring points). The time of play is 60 minutes, divided into four fifteen-minute segments (called quarters).

When a team scores a touchdown, they get six points. After touch down that team has the chance to kick the ball for an extra point or try to score two points by not kicking it.

When a team has possession of the ball lets say when they are on offense, the object is to move the ball forward into the end zone, or, barring that, to move the ball a minimum of ten yards in four attempts (called downs, the first of each series being 'first down,' and so on). To make it easy to keep track of their success or failure, the playing field has lines drawn across it at five-yard intervals, with the yard numbers noted every ten yards. If the offense fails to move the football forward the required ten yards, they must turn the ball over to their opponent. If the offense takes all four downs and fails to move the ball the required ten yards, the ball is turned over to the other team at that point on the field. That is, the defense now becomes the offense at the exact place where the offense has been stopped.