LET'S PLAY SOME FOOTBALL!!!

Like most teenaged males, I love football. American football, that is. But I love it for a good reason. It's very exciting, it's very complex and interesting, and it's pretty much the only thing that gets me pumped enough to blow my voice out. I am an avid fan of the Cleveland Browns, and, as everybody knows, it can be very hard sometimes to be a Cleveland fan. Who am I kidding? It's hard all the time.

So anyways, my high school's team is doing quite well (we're 3-0 at the time I'm writing this) and I hope that we'll be able to do well this year. My one regret so far in my life is that I never tried out for my school's team. Seeing as I'm now a senior and buried firmly in Performing Arts, I really can't reverse that decision. So this post is dedicated to my dad. He was the one who got me into football, and while I didn't like football until about four years ago, he still is the one responsible for getting me into it.

But the football spectacle that we know and love today wasn't always this way. Before it was football, football was rugby, played extensively in Europe in the 1800s. It was also played as rugby in the U.S. at various colleges and universities at that time. Modern football as we know it sprung from rugby with the help of Walter Camp, who gave the game crucial concepts like the line of scrimmage and the whole idea of downs.

The rules of the game were toned and perfected up until the early 1900s, when the idea of the forward pass finally became common. However, college football, not pro football, held the nation until the 1950s. The focus was on colleges ballplayers and the many rivalries that existed between schools. Bowl games were around 100 years ago, and they're still being played today. (I personally hate the Bowl system, because it forces a team to be virtually perfect to have any chance of reaching the championship)

The first pro football deal was made back in 1892 by Bill Heffelfinger, who was paid $500 to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association. The Ohio League (Ohio is pretty much the source of all football culture) was formed in 1903, and in 1920, the Ohio League added teams from outside Ohio, forming the American Professional Football Association in the process. 2 years later, they became what is now known as the NFL.

The NFL proceeded to become the "major league" of American Football, and popularity for pro football (as opposed to college football) grew. The popularity reached its peak after the 1958 Championship Game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, which has been named the Greatest Game Ever Played. A new league, the American Football League, was created in 1960 because of the ever growing success of pro football. Seeing this new league as a threat, the NFL decided to merge the two leagues and make a new championship game: the Super Bowl.

Ever since that 1958 Championship Game and the later merge between the NFL and AFL, football has been a hit, arguably replacing baseball as America's sport. As I said at the beginning, I love football. I love watching it on all three levels of competition, high school, college, and pro. So I'd like to close out this post with a message to Cleveland: don't disappoint me Browns. Although I haven't lived long enough to truly appreciate what it means to be a Cleveland fan, I have already felt that cold feeling of disappointment and that burning desire to have a better team. I will not quit on you, Cleveland. But you'd better not quit on me.