Freedom Circle logo
Freedom Circle

Where Can You Find Freedom Today?

The most popular spectator sport in the United States

American football, referred to as football in the United States and Canada is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, which is the team controlling the oval-shaped football, attempts to advance down the field by running with or passing the ball, while the defense, which is the other team, aims to stop the offense's advance and aims to take control of the ball for themselves. The offense must advance at least ten yards in four downs, or plays, or otherwise they turn over the football to the defense; if the offense succeeds in advancing ten yards or more, they are given a new set of four downs. Points are primarily scored by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone for a touchdown or kicking the ball through the opponent's goalposts for a field goal. The team with the most points at the end of a game wins.

Articles

The Case against Football, by Joseph Sobran, The Reactionary Utopian, 10 Jan 2006
Discusses Sobran's several peeves and a few things he likes about American football, also complaining about journalistic coverage of the 2006 Rose Bowl
The rest of the world reserves the word football for a sport in which the ball is kicked constantly. ... What I don't understand is using the word for a sport in which the ball is kicked only a few times per game; most of the time it's carried or thrown. ... Think about it: the overwhelming majority of football players never kick the ball in their entire careers! ... Worse, every so-called football team is actually several teams, an offensive team and a defensive team, plus 'special' teams which do most of the actual kicking. So the victory or loss of a given game depends on the independent performances of all these teams.
The NFL is Not for Libertarians, by S. M. Oliva, 26 Apr 2012
Examines various statist aspects of the National Football League
The NFL is not a private enterprise in any free-market sense. It was at one time, but since the 1960s, it has steadily morphed into a subsidiary of the state ... In the 1950s, the Justice Department's Antitrust Division decided to interfere with the rights of NFL franchise operators ... regarding the ... games on the new medium of television. By 1961, the NFL was forced to lobby Congress for a special antitrust exemption just so it could sign its first national television contract. A few years later, a similar exemption was secured to permit the NFL's merger with the American Football League.

The introductory paragraph uses material from the Wikipedia article "American football" as of 17 Oct 2018, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.