Any football fans out there?

[Jonathan]

Who ya got for the SuperBowl tomorrow?

I'll be rooting for the Niners. Been cheering for them since I was a kid, back in the Montana days.

It's been a long time since they were relevant. A good decade or so of being pretty mediocre. I got the chance of a lifetime to get to my first NFL game last season and saw them lose to the Giants in OT at the NFC Championship. Man, that was one awesome weekend.

16147

[Shep]

I'm a big football fan myself. More of a Browns fan for NFL (and, oddly, Oregon Ducks for NCAA), so I'm obligated to root for the 49'ers. I say "obligated" because of the Clevland Browns Relocation Controversy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Browns_relocation_controversy), in which the Browns owner moved the entire team to Baltimore because they could build a new stadium, even though the very next day, we voted to do exactly that. It's only due to legal battles that they became the Ravens, and it wasn't until three years later that we formed a new team to be the Browns. But to each his own. :)

Being an Oregon fan, I also have to root for Oregon alumni, and LaMichael James (Oregon running back) is now on the 49'ers. Led the nation in rushing yards and touchdowns his sophomore year, even though he missed the first game of the season. This year he's a rookie for the 49'ers, so naturally I'm rooting for them.

[Jonathan]

I can understand the Browns parallel. Those types of business decisions in sports can leave a bad taste in the mouth of the fans for a long time.

I don't follow NCAA football as much, mostly just due to it not being on very many channels here. Well, I guess and also because my alma mater is a Canadian school. And we would often get a whopping 5-600 fans to the game, lol. Nice call on the Oregon Ducks. I have a hat of theirs somewhere around here. I used to go to Portland on business once per month for a while and jumped on their bandwagon for a while :)

Hard to sometimes trace back why you cheer for a certain team, and when there isn't even any of them in the country, lots of guys in this area have strange reasons for cheering for the team they do. When I was about 8-10 in the early 80s, my Aunt knew a friend in San Fran, and this woman used to send me actual newspaper clippings, magazine articles, or programs from San Fran and the Niners. Talk about hooking an impressionable kid on a team! Fast forward to the time frame where I could have paid for this sort of trip to see a game and they were not very good for a quite some time.

But low and behold, when Green Bay lost their game to the Giants last year and then the game became a SF home game, my mind started putting the trip together. It was amazing even if they lost. And holy cow was it cold and wet at that game!! Didn't matter though, it was great high five'ing other fans around you and all that. There really is a big difference between going to cheer for a home team versus being there cheering for the visiting team.

And funny how the day took some strange twists right from the get go. I was on this particular bus that the writer from the SF paper was on too :)

http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/garchik/article/49ers-Fans-jump-off-Muni-bus-stalled-in-traffic-2674442.php

We got to the game about 20 minutes after the guys were jumping off. Didn't feel like risking a run in with a SF police officer on the freeway ;)

[DMC5180]

I'm for Coach Harbaugh to finally WIN&LOSE one. "I Garrauntee IT" :biggrin:

[Jimmyvonviggle]

Football is great and all, but the more important question is who has the hotter cheerleaders?

Here we go ;


http://www.baltimoreravens.com/ravenstown/cheerleaders/index.html


Or

http://www.49ers.com/gold-rush/team-photo.html

You are All very welcome.

[Cory W]

Unless the CRTC has screwed us over this year, I'll have the commercials on...

[Jonathan]

Bless your heart, Jimmy! I'll call it a tie and the winner will be decided by a big cheerleader pillow fight :)

Cory... I wasn't under the impression the CRTC had stopped screwing us over with the commercials?? All the channels I turn to with the game are trumped over by CTV or TSN or whatever. Even the direct feed CBS channel will have their commercial time dubbed over by Canadian Tire and Tim Horton's commercials. Ugh. Unless you know some special trick??

[Cory W]

Last year, I managed to catch the proper American network feed this way:

-I'm on cable. Not one of the evil satellite companies the CRTC find to be so darling these days.
-I used the HD feed (is there really any other way?)
-I chose the Time Shifted network feed instead of local time.

It appears my provider doesn't simulsub on the time shift feeds, nor HD. This gives me 2 or 3 choices to try to get around the CRTC.

Who's your carrier?

[Jonathan]

Bell TV (satellite).

I had used your method in the past once or twice, but the last couple times I tried it didn't work. Somehow they caught up with the time shifting channels too. I'll give it another shot today, or default to watching the commercials on YouTube at another time :(

[Rhsxo]

Football is great and all, but the more important question is who has the hotter cheerleaders?

Here we go ;


http://www.baltimoreravens.com/ravenstown/cheerleaders/index.html


Or

http://www.49ers.com/gold-rush/team-photo.html

You are All very welcome.

Holy Crap! I didn't know their was another Gold Rush in California. SF here I come!

[Shep]

And... Ravens win it. Damn that was a close game!

[Jonathan]

Well, that wasn't pretty. And for as poorly as they played during the game, in the post-power outage portion, they had a chance to win it with a first and goal and 2 minutes left on the clock. Coach John said "Ray Lewis' career ends on a goal line stand to win the Superbowl." That is pretty sweet if you look at it that way. Congrats to the Ravens. They deserved the win.

[andy blackmon]

In reply to is there any football fans out there YES---I live in Alabama being a football fan comes with the first intake of air in our lungs. Pro ball dang right, any team Payton Manning is playing on. Delorean fan dang right have been a owner for over 30 year Roll Tide and living the dream.
Andy B 03513

[Jonathan]

Football? Motivation? Inspiration? Sounds like all of the above.

http://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/article-1/Byrne-Identity-Ravens-Fans-E-Mail-Inspires-Team/c6349c49-ba16-4c00-88df-8eabf4bf14e6

[timothymoore]

Im a Cincinnati Bengals fan. Rooted for the ravens during the superbowl. Glad they won.

[thirdmanj]

American "football". :huh:

[Shep]

Oh...

American "football". :huh:Says the man in Virginia :confused2:

[thirdmanj]

Says the man in Virginia :confused2:

Geographical location is irrelevant. :lol:

Shit. Isn't Dermont from across the pond, living in GA?

[Shep]

Geographical location is irrelevant. :lol:

Shit. Isn't Dermont from across the pond, living in GA?If by "pond" you mean "the Carolinas", then I suppose so. He's not part of the former USSR last I checked :tongue:

[Dangermouse]

Oh, American "football". :huh:

That was my first thought too. ;)


Geographical location is irrelevant. :lol:

Shit. Isn't Dermont from across the pond, living in GA?

Yes, I am from across the pond – see my Profile for more info.

I grew up with “Association Football” aka soccer and am a longtime Liverpool FC fan, who are currently owned by John Henry, owner of the Red Sox, a purchase that is a thorn in the side of moderator Sean.

I do, however, enjoy watching 'American' Football, but in all honesty I don’t “get it” as much as some of you guys do. I watched my first SuperBowl back when the 49ers were reigning supreme and as it was being shown live, that meant it started at around midnight (GMT) and went on until 3 or 4 on the morning. That, in turn, meant that our pre-game was at the pub until closing time.

I spent more than a couple of years living in AL and as Andy points out above, it is a big football state, (I've even been to Legion Field a couple of times) though I would disagree with him that it is a big ProBall state. They tried the CFL and another pro league (XFL??) both of which failed.

I understand the rules (or at least most of them) but just don’t get the excitement when a player manages to stop the ball 1 yard past the line of scrimmage. So help me out with something I didn’t understand on Sunday. Right at the end of the 4th quarter, there was about 44 seconds on the clock and suddenly it started to run down without any play occurring. It got down to 11 or 12 seconds and no-one seemed to be concerned. The most important minute of the game and everyone is just standing around. What was going on???


Sidebar:

This next bit is not specifically directed at James because I get it aaallllll the time. What is it with people thinking my name is Dermont. Why the ‘N’? I get this every week, it seems. When I give my name on the phone, I get it spelled back with an N, which I put down to poor pronunciation, but when I send an email with my name in the actual address, and signed with “Dermot”, I regularly get the reply “Dear Dermont”. I make posts on here, with my name in the sig, and I get PMs with “Hey Dermont”. And it’s not just a random typo, because it is always N, never another letter.

Not that it bothers me of course.

First I thought it must be a popular American name, perhaps african-american, but when I made this assumption to people, they replied “Nope, never heard of it”. (of course these were also the people who, upon learning that I had just moved there from Ireland, complemented me on picking up the English language so quickly ! - True Story)

So, for fun, I started replying to emails, adding random letters into the senders name – Thanks Ricnk; Hi Borb; Dear Mr Trumrp.



If by "pond" you mean "the Carolinas", then I suppose so. He's not part of the former USSR last I checked :tongue:


I have no idea what this means

[thirdmanj]

Oops. Yeah why the "N"? Maybe people unwittingly think its a French name! :p

[Shep]

Oh oh oh, from across the pond. I thought you meant currently across the pond. Wow I'm an idiot. Completely forgot about relocation. Sorry about that, I redact my previous statements. I need to learn how to read evidently...

[Jonathan]

So help me out with something I didn’t understand on Sunday. Right at the end of the 4th quarter, there was about 44 seconds on the clock and suddenly it started to run down without any play occurring. It got down to 11 or 12 seconds and no-one seemed to be concerned. The most important minute of the game and everyone is just standing around. What was going on???

If I'm thinking the same thing as you are, it was probably when Baltimore had the ball at the end of the game. Basically they were up by 5 at the time and if the clock winds down to zero, game over, they win. Sort of that "the clock is your friend/enemy" idea. All they had to do was run enough plays to make the time tick down to zero, not fumble the ball or something, and they would win.

If a player is tackled in bounds, the clock keeps running. If you go out of bounds or throw an incomplete pass, the clock stops. The Ravens had a 1st down from their own 7 or something with less than two minutes to go. The Niners needed to get the ball back to win. So the Ravens keep running the ball, San Fran uses any remaining timeouts they might have (you get 3 per half), and hope there is some time on the clock if/when they get the ball back.

When Baltimore was on 4th down and kicking the ball away, there were like 11 seconds left and they made a clever move to run around the endzone for a few seconds before giving up a safety (2 points). Now they were winning by 3 instead of 5, but since you only need to win by 1, and winning by 100 doesn't help you any extra, it was a good decision to use up more time.

They kicked it away with 4 seconds left, which is basically time for only that one last play, the Niners receiver got tackled and that was that.

The reason you saw them standing around was because the Niners couldn't do anything to stop the clock nor make them snap the ball sooner, and Baltimore was taking their time on purpose to use as much up as they could. But, ya, it probably looked odd if you didn't recognize what was happening.

Similar to why they put a 24 second shot clock in basketball as once upon a time a team would get the lead and then just hold the ball for 30-40 minutes until the game was over. That got the rules changed pretty quick :)

Ya, I definitely meant American football, not Australian rules/rugby or soccer. Soccer is picking up momentum over here on this side of the pond though. Something about watching these guys putting on an Oscar winning performance on a phantom kick/hit/tackle that makes me change the channel. I played it as a kid though and was the goal keeper if I remember correctly. Man, you need to have your cardio in order to play that game! :)

[Dangermouse]

I

The reason you saw them standing around was because the Niners couldn't do anything to stop the clock nor make them snap the ball sooner, and Baltimore was taking their time on purpose to use as much up as they could. But, ya, it probably looked odd if you didn't recognize what was happening.



I follow the whole "time wasting" concept (popular in soccer), but is there not like a 15 second timer for them to snap the ball? The clock seemed to run down about 30+ seconds.

[Jonathan]

I follow the whole "time wasting" concept (popular in soccer), but is there not like a 15 second timer for them to snap the ball? The clock seemed to run down about 30+ seconds.

Yep, and good guess on the 30+ seconds. The play clock starts the moment the previous play ends and counts down from 40 seconds. So for plays which the game clock keeps running (like you were tackled in bounds), you could run off pretty much about 40 seconds for each play. If you throw an incomplete pass, the game clock stops, but you still need to run your next play within 40 seconds. Understandable why they always run the ball at the end. It doesn't give them the best chance to make a 1st down, but if all you need to do is burn up time to win, it makes sense.