Going to an American campus means living all the typical American college experience. A part of it is to cheer for all the sports team. The most important team here at Whitworth is the football one, and it’s also the one I was most excited to see since it is just a huge symbol for the US.

My dorm is basically just next to the football field so most Saturdays at noon I go there, and I try not to miss on any American experience during my time at Whitworth.

With all that watching, and also by asking some people around, I now have kind of figured out all the rules of football. My conclusion about it is that football players are real courageous, and they have a really good stamina. Courageous because for every “move” all 11/12 players of the team start running and blocking each other and at the end, only 2 or 3 of them touch the ball. For the stamina part, a football game is a whole hour of running since, the clock stops every time the referee whistles so after each 5-10 second play. So, they basically do sprints for 60 minutes but the match in total including all the breaks, is kind of 2 or 3 hours which is kind of long now that winter has come.

The basic goal of a football game is to do a “touchdown” which means reaching the end of the football field with the ball in your hands. This gives you 6 points. There’s also a way to get 3 pints which is by shooting the ball into the U-shaped goal. Also, after a touchdown, there’s a possibility to get an extra point by also shooting the ball but they start in a different situation than the rest of the game.

Basically, the game is 2 teams of 11 or 12 players (I still don’t know when it’s 11 and when it’s 12). One team has the ball: the offense, the other is in defense. One guy from the offense take the ball from the ground (on a one-yard line) and throws it backwards to one of its co-player. Then they all try to go forward with the ball, either by running in the middle of the pile or by throwing to another team-mate who has run further away.

There are 2 ways the defense team can get the ball, either by catching the ball while the offense is throwing it or, the most common way: the offense team has 4 tries to go 10 yards forward, if they don’t manage, the ball directly goes to the other team.

This is basically what I understood from football but I think you need to see it in real life to understand.