The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Football

American Football is a recreational sport that manages to be both extraordinarily complex and extraordinarily simple at the same time, which is perhaps the most human thing about it.

The basic premise involves two teams of large, armor-clad humans attempting to carry or throw an oblong brown leather projectile (misleadingly called a “ball” despite sharing no geometric properties with actual spheres) from one end of a rectangular field to the other. The defending team, naturally, wishes to prevent this from happening, leading to what galactic anthropologists have described as “controlled collisions with occasional outbreaks of actual sport.”

The sport’s name is perhaps its most baffling feature. Despite being called “football,” the ball rarely makes contact with anyone’s feet except during specialized moments called “kicks,” which occur approximately 4% of the time. The remaining 96% involves hands, and yet calling it “handball” was apparently out of the question, as that name was already taken by another sport that Americans don’t play.

This naming confusion becomes even more entertaining when one considers that everywhere else on Earth, “football” refers to what Americans insist on calling “soccer”—a sport where feet and balls interact with delightful regularity. The British, who invented the word “soccer” as slang for “Association Football,” now find it deeply offensive when Americans use it, which is roughly equivalent to being angry at someone for using your own towel after you’ve explicitly told them where it is.

Comparison to Galactic Sports:

American Football bears a passing resemblance to Arcturan Mega-Rugby, though the Arcturans sensibly abandoned armor after discovering that their exoskeletons provided adequate protection. It also shares strategic elements with Betelgeusean Chess-War, minus the actual deaths and plus significantly more commercial breaks.

The sport operates on a uniquely Earth-based time system where sixty minutes of game time somehow expands to occupy three to four hours of real-time, a phenomenon physicists have attributed to “television advertising relativity.” During these temporal anomalies, advertisers beam targeted propaganda into the minds of viewers, which may explain why humans voluntarily return to watch week after week.

Players are organized by highly specialized roles: quarterbacks (who throw), running backs (who run), wide receivers (who receive while being wide, presumably), and roughly seventeen other positions with names like “tight end” and “defensive tackle,” which sound more like descriptions of interpersonal conflict resolution strategies than athletic positions.

The sport features a delightfully baroque scoring system where touchdowns are worth six points (but actually seven with the nearly automatic extra point), field goals are three points, and something called a “safety” is worth two points and is actually bad for the team that gave it up. A two-point conversion exists as an alternative to the one-point conversion, just to keep mathematicians employed.

Strategic Complexity:

Each team is allowed four attempts (called “downs”—another naming mystery) to advance the ball ten yards. Coaches communicate with players via elaborate hand signals and occasionally through radio transmitters hidden in helmets, making it one of the few Earth sports where electronic augmentation is not only legal but mandatory.

The playbook for a single team can contain over 400 different plays, each with cryptic names like “Spider 2 Y Banana” or “Omaha.” This has led xenolinguists to theorize that American Football may actually be an elaborate encryption system disguised as entertainment.

Cultural Significance:

The sport’s championship game, called the Super Bowl, has become something of a secular religious holiday in America, featuring a half-time entertainment spectacle that often overshadows the actual sporting contest. It is one of the few occasions when humans voluntarily gather to watch advertisements, applauding them as if they were art.

American Football players are statistically larger than 97% of the general human population, leading to the popular Earth saying: “I could have played professional football if I were faster, stronger, larger, and had any talent whatsoever.”

Visitor’s Advisory:

If attending an American Football match, be prepared for frequent interruptions, confusing rules, and passionate debates about whether a catch was actually a catch based on criteria that seem to change quarterly. Bring snacks, as you’ll be there for approximately four hours. Do not mention soccer unless you enjoy lengthy arguments about proper nomenclature.

Also, resist the temptation to ask why they don’t just use their feet. They’ve heard it before, and they still don’t have a good answer.