Showing posts with label College football. Show all posts
Showing posts with label College football. Show all posts

Monday, October 12, 2009

Tailgating Tips For Beginners

With the NFL and College football seasons here, its time to review some tailgating tips to make you feel like a champ! Many people that go to games are getting into the tailgating party. For most people they have no clue what to do or how to do it. I am going to give you a few tips to make you look like your a "seasoned" veteran.

Here are the main things you need to consider as a rookie in tailgating:

1. Pack the things you need before you have the party! Assess everything that you will need to bring from home; trash bags, fold out chairs, coolers, beer and all the other necessities. Go to costco a day or so before the game and load up on the hot dogs and hamburgers and anything else you might think and don't forget to properly package them so they don't spoil.

2. Plan out the location of your tailgating party. If you can drive by where you will be tailgating and make sure you have enough space to actually have a party.

3. This one is the most common tailgating failure of all. Don't forget to fill up your propane tank before leaving for the party. You can not cook without the propane.

4. Bring separate coolers for your raw meats and your ready to eat foods! You don't want to make all of your tailgating guests really sick because then they will never go to another one of your parties and a party is no fun with only yourself.

5. This is an easy one. The night before freeze all of your drinks instead of putting them in a cooler full of ice. That way your drinks will be cold and you won't have to deal with the mess of the melting ice. As you become more seasoned at tailgating than you can use the cooler and the ice technique.

6. Go to a store and buy some of your team flags to hang everywhere. After you do that than you can move onto buying balloons and whatnot. The reasoning for this is so that you guests will be able to recognize you easier and locate you faster.

7. Always have food ready to go. Anytime a guest wants to eat there should be food awaiting them. Do not put yourself in a panic mode if your food is not ready.

8. Remove the ashes after grilling and keep them in heavy duty tin foil. Dip the foil completely in water before placing it in a container for trash. That way the trash or the container doesn't catch fire.

9. Lastly, after the party is over remember to clean up your own mess. So, make sure you have plenty of trash bags to dispose of all the garbage.

By doing all of these things, you can consider yourself as one of the Veterans in tailgating.

Christopher Ayers - EzineArticles Expert Author
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Thursday, October 8, 2009

Football Trivia

· In 1905, 18 men died from injuries sustained on the football field. President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in and instituted safety measures to make the game safer.

· The first pick (by Eagles) in the first NFL draft in 1935, was Jay Berwanger from the University of Chicago. He never played in the league.

· The 'huddle' in football was formed due to a deaf football player who used sign language to communicate and his team didn't want the opposition to see the signals he used and in turn huddled around him.

· The first Rose Bowl game was held in 1902 in Pasadena, California. The University of Michigan beat Sanford 49-0.

  • The Vince Lombardi Trophy is awarded to the winners of the Super Bowl.
  • The first black player in the American League was Larry Doby with the Cleveland Indians in 1947.
  • First Instant Replay was used during Army Navy Football Game at Municipal Stadium Philadelphia on December 7, 1963, invented by CBS Director Tony Verna
  • The first professional football team to sport an insignia on their helmets was the Los Angeles Rams in 1950, who hand painted yellow horns on their blue leather helmets.
  • The first Super Bowl was played in 1967. The Green Bay Packers of the National Football League defeated the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League, 35-to-10.
  • The Four Horsemen of the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame played together for the last time in 1925, as the Irish downed Stanford in the Rose Bowl, 27-10. The Four Horsemen were Jim Crowley, Elmer Layden, Don Miller and Harry Stuhldreher.
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Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Football Quotes

Colorado State University quarterback Bradlee ...Image via Wikipedia

Most football teams are temperamental. That's 90% temper and 10% mental.
-Doug Plank

One accusation you can't throw at me is that I've always done my best.
- Alan Shearer

I'd rather play in front of a full house than an empty crowd.
- Johnny Giles

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
- Vince Lombardi

Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.
- Mary McGrory

I learned that if you want to make it bad enough, no matter how bad it is, you can make it.
- Gale Sayers

When in doubt, punt!
- John Heisman

The road to Easy Street goes through the sewer.
- John Madden

Maybe a good rule in life is never become too important to do your own laundry.
- Barry Sanders

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.
- Archie Griffen

Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.
- Frank Gifford

Football isn't a contact sport, it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.
- Duffy Daugherty

I wouldn't ever set out to hurt anyone deliberately unless it was, you know, important -like a league game or something.
- Dick Butkus

Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.
- Joe Theismann

Football is, after all, a wonderful way to get rid of your aggressions without going to jail for it.
- Heywood Hale Broun

I'd catch a punt naked, in the snow, in Buffalo, for a chance to play in the NFL.
- Steve Henderson

Football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbalized, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time.
- Arnold Mandell

American football makes rugby look like a Tupperware party.
- Sue Lawley

I may be dumb, but I'm not stupid.
- Terry Bradshaw

College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.
- Elbert Hubbard

Let's face it, you have to have a slightly recessive gene that has a little something to do with the brain to go out on the football field and beat your head against other human beings on a daily basis.
-Tim Green

You have to play this game like somebody just hit your mother with a two-by-four.
-Dan Birdwell

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
-George F. Will

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
-Erma Bombeck

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
-Erma Bombeck

If you're mad at your kid, you can either raise him to be a nose tackle or send him out to play on the freeway. It's about the same.
-Bob Golic

At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.
-George Plimpton

Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?
-Jim Bouton

One of the great disappointments of a football game is that the cheerleaders never seem to get injured.
-Author Unknown

When I went to Catholic high school in Philadelphia, we just had one coach for football and basketball. He took all of us who turned out and had us run through a forest. The ones who ran into the trees were on the football team.
-George Raveling

The reason women don't play football is because eleven of them would never wear the same outfit in public.
-Phyllis Diller

I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me.
-Anna Quindlen, Living Out Loud, 1988

Watching football is like watching pornography. There's plenty of action, and I can't take my eyes off it, but when it's over, I wonder why the hell I spent an afternoon doing it.
-Luke Salisbury

The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean.
-Erma Bombeck

There are two kinds of people in the world, Notre Dame lovers and Notre Dame haters. And, quite frankly, they're both a pain in the ass.
-Dan Devine, former Notre Dame football coach

I like to believe that my best hits border on felonious assault.
-Jack Tatum

He was the only man I ever saw who ran his own interference.
-Steve Owen, about Bronko Nagurski

Trying to maintain order during a legalized gang brawl involving 80 toughs with a little whistle, a hanky and a ton of prayer.
-Anonymous referee, explaining his job

There are several differences between a football game and a revolution. For one thing, a football game usually lasts longer and the participants wear uniforms. Also, there are usually more casualties in a football game. The object of the game is to move a ball past the other team's goal line. This counts as six points. No points are given for lacerations, contusions, or abrasions, but then no points are deducted, either. Kicking is very important in football. In fact, some of the more enthusiastic players even kick the ball, occasionally.
-Alfred Hitchcock

Men are clinging to football on a level we aren't even aware of. For centuries, we ruled everything, and now, in the last ten minutes, there are all these incursions by women. It's our Alamo.
-Tony Kornheiser

Speed is not your fastest, but your slowest man. No back can run faster than his interference.
-Jock Sutherland

When it comes to football, God is prejudiced - toward big, fast kids.
-Chuck Mills

Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.
-Merle Kessler

Speed, strength, and the inability to register pain immediately.
-Reggie Williams, when asked his greatest strengths as a football player

The tactical difference between Association Football and Rugby with its varieties seems to be that in the former the ball is the missile, in the latter men are the missiles.
-Alfred E. Crawley, The Book of the Ball, 1913

What about football? Is it a sport or a concussion?
-Jim Murray, Los Angeles Times

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.
-Eugene J. McCarthy

I don't like to lose, and that isn't so much because it is just a football game, but because defeat means the failure to reach your objective. I don't want a football player who doesn't take defeat to heart, who laughs it off with the thought, 'Oh, well, there's another Saturday.' The trouble in American life today, in business as well as in sports, is that too many people are afraid of competition. The result is that in some circles people have come to sneer at success if it costs hard work and training and sacrifice.
-Knute Kenneth Rockne

In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard.
-Theodore Roosevelt

Describing an opposing team: Sure, luck means a lot in football. Not having a good quarterback is bad luck.
- Don Shula

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Friday, October 2, 2009

History of Football - BEGINNING OF PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL

Unknown early American Football Team (circa 18...Image via Wikipedia


Welcome to the history of football. Here you will learn more about the history of football. In 1895 the first professional football game in the United States was held in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. That game was against a team that represented Latrobe, Pennsylvania and a team from Jeannette, Pennsylvania.

Over the next 10 years many professional teams were started including The Olympics of McKeesport, Pennsylvania; the Bulldogs of Canton, Ohio; and the Duquesness of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Willie Heston, Jim Thrope, Knute Rockne, and Fritz Pollard where all among noted college players who took up professional football. During the first thirty years the professional game didn't attract many people. There were many military men that wanted to play football, but if they did they were put in jail for not doing their military duties.

The first league of professional football was founded in 1920 and it was called the American Football Association. The admission fee was 100 dollars per team. The teams promised not to use any student player who still had college eligibility left to play football.

In 1922 the American Football Association ended and NFL, the National Football League, was born. Red Grange, a famous halfback from the University of Illinois provided a great stimulus for the league when he joined the Chicago Bears in 1925. His exciting plays drew a large crowd. Professional football attracted many good college football players at that time. The early NFL game was hardly different from college football. College play books and rule books made no attempt to break away from the NCAA, National Collegiate Athletic Association rules. In the league's early years, playing NFL football was a part time job and players held other jobs during the day. Professional football coaches arranged to practice in the evenings, sometimes only three or four times a week.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Should College Football Athletes Be Paid?

Colorado State University quarterback Bradlee ...Image via Wikipedia

College football is it work or is it fun? Some would argue both. The athletes have fun running, catching, blocking, and kicking. They don't necessarily enjoy 4 and 5 hour practices, daily film sessions, and weight lifting. Much of what they do is fun. Also much of what they do is work. With that in mind, should they be paid? Also keep in mind they produce millions of dollars for their schools and risk life and limb.

They have fun. They have worked their whole lives to get to the point where they are able to perform at the college level of athletics. They put in long hours of training and perform at high levels to produce wins and put people in seats. There is no doubt that what they do is work. This is why they give scholarships to the best of these athletes and provide housing and meals. Is that enough? Should they be paid?

Many colleges bring in as much as 45 million dollars a year from the football program. Notre Dame brings in 101 million a year from athletics. College football coaches are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and even millions in many cases. The football program provides money for the entire department of athletics. Football players are given scholarships but no money. They produce a great deal but aren't given any money. I think they should be given a monthly per diem of at least $1000.00 per player.

Yes they risk life and limb with no monetary compensation. There have been athletes to receive substantial injuries from playing football from paralysis, to hip injuries, to ankle injuries and sometimes even death. These injuries have ended possible million dollar careers. They play a gladiator sport that involves violence. Athletes should be compensated monetarily for this risk and in many cases this occurrence of injuries.

The NCAA does not allow for the paying of college football players and athletes. They risk life and limb and work extra hard for their schools. They bring in millions of dollars and provide millions of dollars for other athletics at these universities. They should be paid. No doubt!

I am a writer of many things, but presently I am venturing into college football, so some would call me a sportswriter.

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