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So, it's Super Bowl Sunday and you've gotten yourself invited to a football party but you know next to nothing about the sport or the two teams playing. What to do?
Don't worry, BuzzFeed has got your back! Here are some handy talking points if you found yourself amongst fans of either the New York Giants or the New England Patriots:
Read the rest over at Sly's post over at BuzzFeed: Link
Jen Yates has a roundup of cake wrecks celebrating the Super Bowl. Can you decipher the message on these cupcakes?
HINT: It’s starts with the word “gone.”
Both teams are represented equally in the collection at Cake Wrecks. Link
There you have it gamblers, go put your money down on the Giants. Teddy the Porcupine has called it and you can’t deny his foresight.
Are you a die-hard football fan? Are you a real Super Bowl fanatic? Then you should be able to name all the quarterbacks who won the Super Bowl in its 45-year history. In eight minutes. I named four of them, although one was a gimme. Anyone can do better! Link
The Cup of African Nations for Amputee Football (CANAF) concluded last month in Ghana, and Liberia won the tournament by defeating Ghana in the final game 4-2. Link -via Buzzfeed
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You’ve gotta love it when possessed machines go after those that have wronged them…especially when they do it in such a spectacularly hilarious way.
Via BuzzFeed
Gerard Baker, a native of the UK, grew up playing and watching two different sports called football, or what Americans refer to as soccer and rugby. But since that time, his passion for the sports of his homeland has petered out in favor of the American game. Why? Baker explains:
It’s none of the usual explanations: lots of scoring being better than endless nil-nil draws—I’ve been to cricket matches in which 1,000 runs were scored and you could hardly call them riveting. It’s not the hoopla or the sport-as-family-entertainment thing either which soccer fans accustomed to English hooliganism are supposed to appreciate. (Have you ever been to an Eagles game?)
Baseball fans will have to forgive me here, but the answer, I think, is that football is the quintessential American sport. It’s no accident it hasn’t really caught on elsewhere (the annual NFL game in London notwithstanding) whereas baseball and basketball have at least a claim to a global following and participation.
In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation on this continent, and I don’t mean because it features long breaks in which advertisers get to sell beer and treatments for erectile dysfunction. It sits at the intersection of pioneering aggression and impossibly complex strategic planning. It is a collision of Hobbes and Locke; violent, primal force tempered by the most complex set of rules, regulations, procedures and systems ever conceived in an athletic framework.
Soccer is called the beautiful game. But football is chess, played with real pieces that try to knock each other’s brains out. It doesn’t get any more beautiful than that.
Link -via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: AP
This is the kind of hard choice we’d all like to have. Overachieving Yale quarterback Patrick Witt can’t be in two places at once, but either place could have a great deal to do with the rest of his life.
Witt, a 22-year-old senior from Wylie, Texas, has a scheduling conflict next Saturday. At about the same time he’s expected to lead Yale in his career finale against visiting Harvard in the 128th edition of “The Game,” Witt is also supposed to be at Emory University in Atlanta as one of 212 finalists for the Rhodes Scholarship. His interview in front of a selection committee is Saturday morning. Kickoff is at noon. The interview can’t be rescheduled. This is a problem—albeit a good problem.
The NFL is looking at Witt, who leads his team in completions and is second in passing yards. He also has a 3.91 GPA, which is rare for a star athlete. What would you do? Link -via TYWKIWDBI
After you think about it, see what Witt has decided to do. Link
(Image credit: Ron Waite, Photosportacular)
For the first time ever, Pinckney Community High School in Michigan crowned a homecoming queen they had to summon from the locker room. Brianna Amat received the title while wearing her football uniform, complete with shoulder pads. But that wasn’t the end of the 18-year-old field goal kicker’s big night last Friday. She also won the game.
A short while later, with five minutes to play in the third quarter, Amat was called to the same field to attempt a 31-yard field goal. She split the uprights.
The kick proved decisive as Pinckney held on for a 9-7 victory against a Grand Blanc team that had come into the game ranked seventh in the state in its division. It also earned Amat the nickname the Kicking Queen.
The twin accomplishments were still sinking in Monday, said Amat, a senior who has played soccer since she was 3 but who tried out for the football team only last spring, at her soccer coach’s suggestion.
“It’s just starting to hit me today,” she said in a telephone interview. “The guys were congratulating me, but without them, I wouldn’t even have gotten close” to making the kick.
Amat, who maintains a 4.0 GPA and is active in student government, is the first female to make the school’s varsity football squad. Link -via Breakfast Links
(Image credit: Stephen McGee for The New York Times)
The National Football League begins its new season on Thursday. Today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will determine how psyched up you are! Football fans: can you name the starting quarterbacks for all 32 NFL teams playing this weekend? Some of them may surprise you. You have five minutes -and mental_floss even gives you a starting hint. Good luck! Link
When he was 18, Alan Moore played college football for a year before leaving school to serve with the US Army in Vietnam. When he got back, Moore got a job, got married, and eventually had three children and five grandchildren. But the desire to play football returned to him. Now he’s back, 43 years later. Moore is now a student and a football player at Faulkner University, a small college in Montgomery, Alabama:
Eagles Head Coach Gregg Baker says Moore “got on me the first couple times we talked, because I kept calling him, ‘Yes sir.’ And he said, ‘Coach, you’re not supposed to call me “yes. I’m supposed to call you ‘Yes, sir.”‘[...]
Says Baker, “Alan came to us back in the spring and said, ‘My story is showing these kids there’s no reason to give up on your dreams, and there’s no reason not to continue trying to get your education.”
Moore lives in the dorms, eats in the cafeteria and attends class, proving, observes “Early Show on Saturday Morning” co-anchor Russ Mitchell, he has the mind, the heart and foot to compete with players young enough to be his grandchildren.
Video at the link.
Link -via First Things | Photo: Yahoo! Sports
Football is definitely back this fall, but will the players show up after seeing this insightful video about what playing in the NFL does to your brain? Former player Dave Duerson donated his brain to the NFL Brain Bank so researchers can clearly see what happens when you knock your head around for a living, and the results aren’t very pretty. But did anyone really think being a professional football player would be good for your mental health? I think not.
A Danish football league for 14-year-olds got a boost reminiscent of Improv Everwhere’s Best Game Ever when a group that was “tasked with making the Under 21 European Football Championship more visible” converged on a game unbeknownst to the players and made it feel like a championship final! They brought spectators, avid fans, cheerleaders, a marching band, vendors, sports journalists, and even soccer stars. A good time was had by all. -via reddit
Won’t someone think of the chicken? An extended NFL lockout would be bad for football lovers, but it’d be absolutely devastating to the chicken wing industry:
"It would kill wings, it would be terrible on wings," Joe Sanderson said at the Reuters Global Food and Agriculture Summit on Monday.
Chicken wings are popular fare at sports bars, especially on fall and winter Sundays when the National Football League has most of its games.
After weeks of deliberations NFL team owners and players have not reached agreements on a number of labor issues, including pay and profit sharing. A federal court will hear an antitrust suit filed by NFL players on April 6.
Wholesale chicken wing prices generally run up in the weeks ahead of the league’s Super Bowl each February. This year, however, prices have been pressured by too many chickens on the lots.
This video is like a Hollywood sports film (The Mighty Ducks, Hoosiers, A League of Their Own) condensed into five minutes. It’s a true story that took place in the village of Koh Panyee, Thailand in 1986, dramatized by the ad agency Leo Burnett & Arc Worldwide for Thai Military Bank. -via reddit
What do you get when you combine field goal kicking and skeet shooting? A lot of dead footballs.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Afrojacks
It’s been called the greatest college prank ever pulled: in 1961 Rose Bowl, a team of Caltech students altered the University of Washington’s halftime flip-card routine so it’d spell out "CALTECH."
Here’s how they did it, as told by the mastermind of the stunt (a then 19-year old student) Lyn Hardy:
"There was a lot of luck involved," the retired engineer says during an interview at his home in Torrance. "From a maturity of age looking back, what were the chances of pulling that thing off? I’d say zip. But you don’t know that when you’re 19."
Hardy, after learning that the Washington band and cheerleaders were staying in dormitories at Long Beach State, showed up posing as a reporter for the Dorsey High student newspaper. (Hardy, a Caltech junior at the time, was a Dorsey graduate.)
The cheerleaders, who organized the flip-card routine, willingly shared the technical details of how it worked.
"Three very nice guys . . . talked me through the whole thing, showed me where they kept everything," Hardy says.
Later, when the cheerleaders left for dinner, Hardy and another of Caltech’s so-called "Fiendish 14" broke into their room by picking the lock. Lifting a card-stunt instruction card, they took it back to Pasadena and had some 2,400 copies made.
Early on New Year’s Eve, while the cheerleaders were at Disneyland, Hardy’s group broke into their dorm room again, this time "borrowing" the master instructions.
Jerry Crowe of the Los Angeles Times has the story: Link (Photo: Wally Skalij)
Previously on Neatorama: Seven
College Pranks
Comments Off The marching band of the University of Hawaii performed this carefully choreographed piece during halftime at a recent game against the University of Southern California. The band members formed a stick figure football player moving across the field and kicking a ball.
via Geekosystem
Constables in Fayette County, Pennsylvania needed to serve arrest warrants to certain folks, but the people in question wouldn’t leave their homes. So the officers decided to lure the suspects outside using a van decorated in a Pittsburgh Steelers theme:
“It’s been working great,” Coleman said. “We sit outside and lay on the horn, and they come out. They’re interested and curious.”
The interest didn’t end after the individuals found out they’d been had, either.
“One guy tried to buy the van off of us,” Younkin said, adding that he named their new tactic “The Fayette County Constables Do the End Around,” referring to a trick football play.
To keep with the football theme of using the Steelers van, Coleman and Younkin even play the Pittsburgh Steelers fight song on the way to Haggerty’s office to those they pick up.
Link via Deadspin | Photo: Furdell.com
It was simple and brilliant play by the football team of Driscoll Middle School from Corpus Christi, Texas. The quarterback took the ball and casually strolled forward, acting as though the play hadn’t started. But it had, and he passed the opposing team’s defensive line before they realized it.
At a high school football game in South Dakota, one player punted the ball 40 yards. The ball hit the ground, and thanks to strong winds, started rolling on the ground. And rolling. And rolling. Right up to the 3-yard line. At the link, you can watch an embedded video of the play.
American football, especially between rival colleges, can be an incomprehensible spectacle to anyone outside the US. Stephen Fry reports:
Simultaneously preposterous… impressive, charming, ridiculous, expensive, overpopulated, wonderful, American.
Even funnier are the YouTube comments speculating as to what camera tricks were used in this video to make the game look so big. Link (embedded YouTube video)
Last Friday, the Snohomish Panthers were losing a home football game to the Lake Stevens Vikings. It would have been a game to forget until they put in 17-year-old Ike Ditzenberger, who has Down syndrome. Ike ran the ball 51 yards to score the team’s only touchdown in the game. Link -via Buzzfeed
US college football conferences have reshuffled their membership this year. That’s the subject of a tough Lunchtime Quiz today at mental_floss. If you know the history of the conferences, you just might do well. I didn’t. Link
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Troy Polamalu plays for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He wears long hair to honor his Samoan heritage. It’s gotten Polamalu in trouble before — he was once tackled from behind by his someone who grabbed his locks, as you can see from the video at the link. To make sure that nothing unfortunate happens to his hair, Polamalu has insured it for a million dollars:
Lloyds of London has written a policy on the Pittsburgh Steelers safety’s locks, in the kind of publicity stunt that rises to the top of search engines on the week before real sports resume after Labor Day. There’s a serious reason for Polamalu’s ‘do: he has not cut it since 2000 and wears it as a tribute to his Samoan ancestors. But there’s a product tie-in on the insurance: Polamalu endorses Head & Shoulders shampoo, whose parent company sought the policy.
Link via Geekosystem | Photo: Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press
When his son entered high school in Warner Robins, Georgia, little did pastor Donald Crosby know that he would soon be involved in fighting Satan himself, in the form of the high school’s mascot:
The devil is at the center of a fight that seems to start every few years when someone new to Warner Robins realizes that the city’s oldest high school, which has one of the most successful football programs in Georgia, rallies around a green-eyed, pitchfork-carrying demon.
The Warner Robins High School Demons.
A pastor at Kingdom Builders Church of Jesus Christ was shocked when he realized his own son could be among the hundreds of students shouting ‘Go Demons!’ to cheer on the school’s sports teams, but particularly in football, where the Demons have won four state championships over the years.
Link – via Fark (photo: Football Friday Night)
You’d think that anyone could tell the difference between historical figures canonized by the Catholic church and Louisiana football players, but today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is surprisingly challenging! I scored a dismal 42%. Link
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These two fans spotted at the World Cup game between England and Algeria were compared to Laurel and Hardy. You don’t have to understand the language to enjoy the video clip, which includes more World Cup links at The Litter Box. Link
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In 1966, England was preparing to host the World Cup games when someone stole the championship Jules Rimet Trophy out from under their noses! Police received a ransom note and met with the contact -and arrested him. But it took a little dog named Pickles to actually find the trophy. Read the story of how Pickles became the hero of the World Cup at mental_floss. Link
The short version of last week’s World Cup game between the US and England features only the best parts -both goals, with instant replays. In LEGO! This video was created by the folks at Lego Fussball, who have Lego versions of many games. English translation by The Guardian. -via Laughing Squid
