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* What are the positions in football?

There are two types of position, an offensive position and a defensive position. One of the most essential offensive positions is the quarterback. The protectors of the quarterback are the offensive line.

As an additional protection there are the running-the-ball positions of running back and fullback. These positions are located in the backfield, behind the quarterback. The last offensive position is the wide receiver. This position has the main objective of receiving (catching) the ball when the quarterback throws (passes) it.

The defensive positions are: defensive end, linebacker, cornerback, and safety, who has the last thing to say about defense. Safeties are located at the back, while the defensive ends are out front.

* What does each position in football do?

Offensive positions are: quarterback, offensive line, running back, fullback, and wide receiver. The quarterback is the leader of the team. He gets the ball at the beginning of each play and he makes the decision whether to throw the ball or run it.

The offensive line’s job is to defend the quarterback or the running back, especially while they have the ball. Another thing the offensive line does is block or catch passes.

Running backs and fullbacks are the major hurrying unit. The wide receiver is the one who will usually catch the ball when the quarterback throws it. He must be tall and quick.

Defensive positions are: defensive end, linebacker, cornerback, and safety. The defensive ends are the outer part of the defensive team. Linebackers are the most important line-up of the defense. They are the quick, hard hitters. Cornerbacks are in charge of defending the wide receiver so he can catch the ball and run with it, while the safeties guard and defend the cornerbacks.

* Where did the name football originate?

A form of football called harpaston was first played by the ancient Greeks. In the United States it was played as early as 1609 in Virginia, though in a simpler form. For the ball, they used the inflated bladder of a slaughtered pig.

Most “football” today is played in Europe and South America, and is the sport that North Americans call soccer. Football got its name because in soccer the hands cannot be used to move the ball. Later, rugby came into popularity, wherein the hands are allowed to be used.

American football has been widely influenced by rugby, and is known throughout the world today as (guess what) “American football.”

* Where did they get the shape of the football?

The shape of the football comes from the shape of the ball in the game of rugby. Football has an elongated ball with pointed ends. The ball is perfectly designed for the player to hold it easily and have a nice aerodynamic motion when it is perfectly thrown. It also has an unpredictable bounce when it hits the ground.

The ball is eleven inches long and about nine inches wide. All of the manufacturers put some laces on one side so the players can grip and hold it easily. This is the reason why rugby and football have almost the same shape of ball, in contrast to soccer, which has a round ball that is manipulated mainly by the feet.

If you are interested in football, especially in college football, read on to learn some interesting insight into the roots of the game.

In the 1890s college football had already created strong emotions of love and hate. Big-time eastern football had demonstrated that it could draw large crowds, create alumni support, and build an identity that would attract new students. The fact that it had little to do with classical education bothered only the traditionalists on campus and a handful of crotchety purists elsewhere who wrote critically of football in magazines, newspaper articles, and official college reports.

Outward appearances may have changed, but the gridiron problems in that era appear remarkably similar to the present. In the 1890s big-time recruiters and alumni contacts scoured the eastern prep schools for talented juniors and seniors ready to entice them to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Occasionally, unscrupulous alumni convinced students to quit high school before they graduated in order to enroll at an institution with a big-time team. Boosters funneled tuition money to poor but athletically talented boys from the coal fields of Pennsylvania and the industrial towns of the Northeast to preparatory schools in order to prepare them for big-time college athletics. Some of these young men were in their mid-twenties when they finally entered college. Other athletes went from school to school selling their services, phantom players who had no academic ties with the institution.

Big-time alumni football entrepreneurs—the counterpart of today’s athletic directors—arranged a schedule of games which began with weak teams and worked up to big money games held in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Gridiron profits supported stadium building, sumptuous living quarters and training tables for players, as well as Pullman cars for retinues of trainers, massagers, alumni coaches, and other hangers-on who followed the team to the big games. What was left over went to support an array of lesser sports that big-time football had eclipsed.

At the major football schools critics complained that football players became the campus elite, admired by their fellow students and regarded skeptically by many faculty. In the absence of professional football, players basked in the attention of the media, and the names of the gridiron stars appeared regularly in the sports pages of big city newspapers. Even college faculty and presidents had to be properly worshipful of football and its elite because they knew that football advertised their schools and helped to retain the loyalty of alumni. As a result, they often ignored or remained blissfully unaware of scams to admit unqualified students, play athletes who never enrolled, or resort to stratagems to keep weak players eligible.

Though booster organizations did not exist outside of alumni groups, booster alumni and townspeople, student managers, and even faculty engaged in unethical acts. A Princeton alumnus named Patterson entertained football players and made every effort to entice them to his alma mater. Authorities at Swarthmore lured the huge lineman, Bob (“Tiny”) Maxwell, from the University of Chicago and arranged for the president of the college to pass his bills to a prominent alumnus. Professor Woodrow Wilson, a fanatic Princeton enthusiast, shamelessly used football when he spoke to alumni organizations and vigorously opposed football reform in the 1890s and early 1900s. In contrast, Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate, who gloried in the strenuous life and strongly supported Harvard football, turned against football brutality in 1905 and initiated the first efforts in his capacity as president to reform the spirit in which big-time football teams competed.

We know that the prototype for athletic organization began at eastern institutions in the 1880s and 1890s. Yale’s Walter Camp, “the father of American football,” became the model for the coach and athletic director. While pursuing a business career, he also acted as Yale’s de facto vice president for athletic operations, who dominated the rules committees and ceaselessly publicized the game. From the profits of big games in Boston and New York, Camp created an ample reserve fund that supported lesser sports, afforded lush treatment for athletes, and provided the money that eventually went toward building Yale Bowl, the first of the modern football stadiums. By making Yale into an athletic powerhouse, Camp built the school’s reputation, making it second only to Harvard. Because he succeeded so well, Camp became the first big-name foe of sweeping football reforms—and an especially hard-core opponent of the forward pass.

By the turn of century the deaths of players in football led state legislators to introduce laws banning the gridiron game. Players for big-time teams, critics charged, were coached to injure their opponents or “put them out of business.” The nature of the game, with its mass formations and momentum plays, made football less an athletic contest than a collegiate version of warlike combat. Eventually the violence in football led to attempts to reduce its brutality through reforms. New rules put a strong emphasis on better officiating and on less dangerous formations, but they did not necessarily improve the athletic environment.

The deaths and brutality presented an excellent opportunity to root out the worst excesses of the runaway football culture. In the 1890s and early 1900s, responding to public opinion, professors and presidents spent a great deal of time talking about the overemphasis of intercollegiate athletics—and, in some cases, passing rules at the conference and institutional level to regulate college sports. Why, then, did college presidents and faculty, who had far more authority over their students than their modern counterparts, fail to control the gridiron beast? Put differently, why did school presidents and faculty often themselves become part of the athletic problem?

. One problem might be that faculty members played major roles in introducing early football. In addition to Woodrow Wilson, who served as a part-time coach at Wesleyan, an English instructor at Oklahoma who had recently come from Harvard, Vernon Parrington, taught the fundamentals of football on the windswept practice field in Oklahoma. At Miami University of Ohio the president called upon all able-bodied members of the faculty to go out for football. In a game between North Carolina and Virginia a member of the North Carolina faculty scored the winning touchdown. Often the faculty proved helpful to the budding football programs in other ways such as giving athletes passing grades or writing articles arguing that football built intellect. Only a handful, like Wisconsin’s Frederick Jackson Turner, made a determined effort to root out the abuses in the culture of college football such as the intense media attention given to the sport and its tendency to cushion star athletes from academic requirements. That was more than a century ago. When we turn to the 1980s and 1990s what do we encounter? Outward appearances of football may have changed, but the problems appear hauntingly similar. Big-time football teams induce players to attend their institution with offers of cars and money as well as running booster operations to funnel cash to blue-chip players. Players who obtain special admission or enter the institution fraudulently do so only to play football and often leave without graduating. Schools manage to keep their players eligible by manufacturing credits or by easing them into simple courses in which they are assured of receiving passing grades. Some coaches engage in violence toward players in practice and even try to drive them out of school so that they can use their scholarship slot.

Athletic departments and institutional officials have become obsessed with the potential for profits from televised big games or bowl games. Big-time teams in the NCAA try to manipulate the organization so that they will be able to have more coaches, scholarships, and only minimal academic requirements. Players commit acts of violence and brutality, then manage to avoid the consequences. College presidents whose salaries and prominence fall far short of the head football coaches dutifully show up at football games and related alumni events, treading cautiously around the mire of big-time college athletics.

All of this has added up to major athletic scandals, most of them involving big-time football. Scandals such as the pay-for-play violations at Southern Methodist and Auburn from the late 1970s to the early 1990s man-aged to create internal disruptions and negative publicity at numbers of big-name institutions. Yet, in spite of the obvious flaws in college football, it continues to enlarge its grip on the major universities. The athletic foundations persist in enlarging their massive gridiron complexes, selling the rights to buy tickets for upscale luxury boxes and suites, and then collecting additional revenues for the sale of high-priced tickets. The major teams have created indoor facilities out of donations that might have gone to deserving but impoverished non-athletes for scholarships. While quasi-professional student-athletes play the game, ordinary students have little to do with the sport. In an atmosphere of highly specialized career coaches, publicists, trainers, and tutors, college football reflects more than ever the professionalism that reformers long ago set out to de-emphasize.

No one would deny that football constitutes one of the most entertaining and enjoyable spectator sports. In the early days some faculty believed that the student enthusiasm for football would enable the institutions to alleviate the pervasive antisocial behavior of undergraduates. Being aware of its appeal, most athletic critics and reformers attempted to change football rather than to abolish it. The few colleges that dropped football did so it because the school had no choice or, occasionally, because a college president happened to wield unusual power at a critical moment in football’s history. Far and away the largest group of thoughtful gridiron critics have attempted to reform football and to reshape it in such a way that it fit more reasonably and appropriately into the spirit and life of the university. Why have they not succeeded?

Beginning in the 1890s and continuing into the 1990s, reformers have spent tens of thousands of hours attending meetings and conferences, devising new rules to solve the latest problems that have cropped up, and generally trying to work out better systems for their own institutions; in the early 1900s moderate reformers founded the NCAA to deal with deaths and brutality and to put football securely under the thumb of the faculty and college presidents. Again in the early 1950s, in a groundswell of outrage against cheating, gambling, and subsidies for athletes, college presidents and faculty members tried to create stricter standards to reduce the greed and professionalism in football rather than to drop it altogether. In the 1980s and early 1990s an outbreak of scandal in big-time football resulted the same response of temporary uneasiness and halting reforms which had become by then a pattern in the history of college football.

The outbreak in the 1980s once again clearly emphasized the failure of reform to bring about real change. In three major periods of gridiron upheaval the colleges have been unable or unwilling to eliminate the causes of chronic cheating. While political reforms by Congress and the states have achieved some enduring success, football and big-time athletics generally have had to face the same issues again and again—much like Sisyphus repeatedly pushing the stone uphill. Why does big-time football manage to be almost constantly in a state of crisis? Is there some quality about football, or college sports generally, or a flaw in higher education which causes this turmoil? If the Greek ideal of education stands for the training of body, spirit, and mind, why have the colleges failed so abysmally at their mission?

Good question, isn’t it? But the answer is beyond the subject of this article – and, unfortunately, beyond the expertise of the college football experts.

If you’ve had a chance to use Florida State football tickets in the past 20 years or so, you’ve been privileged to watch one of the most dominant programs in the history of college football. The Seminoles have dominated the ACC as well, and they have produced countless NFL stars over the years.

However, the Seminoles are showing some early signs of decline, and given that their legendary coach, Bobby Bowden, is nearing the end of his historic career, Seminoles fans may be watching a ship that’s slowly taking on water. We’ll examine why FSU fans should brace themselves for a bit of a dark period below.

Succeeding a Legend

Have you ever tried to succeed a legend? It’s not easy, that’s for sure. Whoever replaces Bowden will have to deal with constant comparisons, and will only have to fill the shoes of the most successful, when measuring by number of wins, college football coach of all time. It’ll be a thankless job where the new coach will almost be set up to fail, even though it won’t really be anyone’s fault. Florida State football tickets were an afterthought before Bowden arrived on campus in 1976, as the team had won only four games over the previous three seasons.

One need only look at Florida State’s neighbors to gain an understanding of the task that awaits Bowden’s successor. Ron Zook failed at Florida after Steve Spurrier moved to the NFL, and Jim Donnan and Ray Goff did not meet expectations at Georgia after Vince Dooley hung up the headset in Athens. If you want to look further west, ask Frank Solich how things went at Nebraska after he succeeded Tom Osborne. Solich had a good record, but not good enough, and he was dismissed after only a few seasons.

Recent Record

Bowden’s list of accomplishments at FSU is stunning. He’s won two national championships and finished in the AP Top 5 an unbelievable 14 consecutive years. Florida State also won 10 or more games for 14 consecutive seasons, but from 2001 through 2005, the Seminoles lost 20 games. Previously, it had taken 15 seasons to lose that many games.

Florida State has won 10 games only once in the past five years, which is a far cry from doing just that 14 consecutive times, and generally speaking, teams no longer fear Florida State the way they once did. Bowden is beginning to lose some recruiting battles that he had always won, and some would say it’s because he can no longer guarantee that he’ll be around for four or five more seasons, as he is, after all, about to turn 77.

In-State Competition

Although Bowden has always had to contend with in-state powers Miami and Florida, it seems that these two programs are starting to creep up on Florida State a bit. Miami is struggling so far in 2006, but they’ve won several national championships in recent years and are always a serious threat to win it all. Florida has a hot new coach in Urban Meyer, and he’s building a program that could challenge for the national title in 2006 despite a brutal schedule.

Miami and Florida have also started to snare recruits from talent-rich Florida that would have never considered any other school than FSU a decade ago, and that’s perhaps the most troubling sign for the future of the program and for the next coach.

Basically, there will never be another Bobby Bowden, and the next coach at Florida State will get an unwanted lesson in that reality. Florida State football tickets will continue to sell well for the foreseeable future, but they may become just a bit easier to find before too long.

Given the massive popularity of the NFL, it’s surprising that the sport is shrouded in so much betting misunderstanding and misconception.

Let’s try to separate betting myth from reality:

Myth #1: Betting lines are created to beat the public.
Reality: With the exception of the Super Bowl, the public plays almost no role in the linemaking process. The betting line is created and adjusted to meet the opinion of professional gamblers because it is they, not the casual fan, who bets serious money on the game.

Myth #2: Betting lines get balanced action.
Reality: While the goal is to construct a betting line that is of equal attraction to both favorite and underdog players, it rarely works out that way. More typically, a third of the games on the NFL schedule will have an insignificant amount of betting to cause much of a concern, another third will have active but balanced betting and the remaining third will have mostly one-way action. Traditionally, how the house fares on these lopsided games, called “decisions,” determines whether books win or lose.

Myth #3: Bookmakers have inside information that they use to establish “trap” games.
Reality: Nowadays, with nearly everyone having access to the Internet, it’s not so much the information as how well that data is interpreted. Bookmakers still may occasionally receive information regarding injuries or weather changes before players, but thanks to technology, that advantage often can be measured in seconds. Many years ago, if a bookmaker found out some significant nugget of data, he might try to lure the bettor to the “wrong” side. Those days are gone as inside information has all but ceased to exist and there is no such thing as a “trap” game.

Myth #4: Bettors have the edge early in the season because oddsmakers and bookmakers need more time to assess the teams.
Reality: More hours are spent analyzing the opening week of the NFL season than any other is. A detailed, in-depth assessment of NFL teams begins more than a month before the opening kickoff. While it’s true that teams often do not tip their hand during the preseason or against weak, non-divisional foes, players are in no better position to uncover this deception than are bookmakers. Historically, the first six weeks of the season have been very kind to bookmakers. That’s probably not just luck.

Myth #5: Professional gamblers pick their spots, betting just a couple of games a weekend.
Reality: Actually, sophisticated gamblers bet a lot of games. Think of it this way: If you’re a successful gambler, why risk serious money on just a few games where a freak play or an official’s call can make you a loser? The wider the net is tossed, the less of a factor luck becomes in the outcome.

Myth #6: Wiseguys bet more on games they really like.
Reality: More than any misconception, this myth probably best illustrates the difference between how professionals and amateurs think. A professional gambler believes that if a game is worth betting, it’s worth betting significantly. Professional bettors generally wager approximately the same amount on every game they play. The concept of a “best bet” is a media creation that is foreign to professional sports bettors. Professional gamblers believe all their bets are good ones; that’s why they make them.

Myth #7: Bettors can win by concentrating on a specific conference, division or region.
Reality: Not likely. It’s not enough to have one specific area of expertise because the NFL schedule demands that teams play half their games outside their own division. Knowing the strength of a team is worthless if you don’t also know the strength of the opponent.

Myth #8: Statistical wagering trends are important.
Reality: Technical analysis may be popular but it’s hardly meaningful. Professional bettors put little faith in the favorite/underdog, home/away pointspread analysis that so often is cited by gridiron “handicappers.” It’s just another method of backfitting dismissed as irrelevant by wiseguys.

Myth #9: It’s never wise to bet on rumors
Reality: Oh, yes it is. For example, if a professional bettor hears a rumor that Peyton Manning has the flu and is too ill to play quarterback for the Colts, he’ll quickly bet on Indianapolis’ opponent. If the rumor is correct, the gambler has stolen the line on a game that’s certain to change. If the rumor is false, then he’s played Indianapolis’ opponent at a fair price. Since most lines are accurate, the bettor takes little betting risk in chasing a rumor.