UnNews:A foreigner's guide to the Super Bowl
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This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation. |
Tonight, in the United States of America, the Super Bowl will be contested, to decide who will be world champions.
The champions are nearly always American, but over the years there have been strong challengers from Canada, Mexico, and Texas.
Read on for the UnNews guide to our non-American readers about the ins and outs, ups and downs of football.
The Ritual[edit | edit source]
Super Bowl weekend is a modern version of a pagan ritual.
In the same way that indigenous Native American tribes have religious rituals in which tribesmen fast or ingest poisonous plants in order to see visions, North American sports fans embark upon an evening of sleep deprivation on the Saturday night, followed by a day of feasting, alcohol consumption, and purging.
This connection with Native Americans is also reflected in the nicknames of many NFL teams. You may have noticed that it's actually more common to refer to teams by these nicknames (e.g. The Eagles) than by their place names (e.g. Philadelphia).
This is not necessarily because the place in question is a shithole (although visitors to Philedelphia might care to argue) but rather because the evocative nicknames call to mind a primal, wild version of America, ideal to get you in the mood for several hours of bashy-bashy.
The Game[edit | edit source]
The field is 91m long, divided neatly into ten 9.1m zones.
Team squads, rosters, can be of up to 276 players, but only 11 can be on a field at any time because most are required to guard their team's valuable Gatorade from enemy attacks. Most of the players must be black, except for:
- People who kick, (the origins of this date back to slavery when European slavers, fearing the safety of their soccer dominance, deigned not to breed slaves who were found to be good at kicking pigs' parts around).
- People who throw, (so-called quarter-blacks because their regular fraternizing with African Americans sees them use expressions like "Yeah baby, we smacked that!")
- Stocky men with big asses who are dubbed tight ends for obvious reasons.
Until recently, coaches were exclusively white, and although recent years have seen a handful of black coaches, most currently employed head coaches come from a single family, the Harbaughs, an incredible dynasty started by patriarch Harbaugh Hubba Hubba Harbaugh.
When a team has the ball, it has four attempts, or downs, to move the ball 9.1m forward. The team is only allowed to do so when the other team is looking. The word down comes from Down's syndrome, because if the team fails to make it the whole 9.1m (which, incidentally, gives us the expression, "The whole nine metres"), they are forced into the humiliating act of punting in which a player kicks the ball as high as he can in the air, much like a child with Down's syndrome who doesn't understand the game would.
Scoring[edit | edit source]
The ends of the field, the endzones, are lovingly painted in the teams' colors. Running into this area with the ball might seem distasteful, giving that you are stepping all over the paintwork, but it's a great way to earn your team points - a touchdown means 6 points, to be specific. An extra point is awarded if the same ball is then kicked through the Y-shaped goal posts, designed to represent an African-American citizen raising his hands in a vain attempt to avoid being shot by a police officer. Teams can also opt for a two-point conversion - an advanced, risky play, involving a rabbi and a small scalpel.
In any other moment, kicking the ball through the posts earns a team three points. This is called a field goal. In particularly defensive games, the action is nothing but field goal attempt after field goal attempt because running or passing the ball can lead to nasty bruises and brain fall-aparting. The game is so dangerous, the offensive team (that is, the team with the ball, not offensive in the Washington Redskins sense) can be regularly seen joining together in a huddle and discussing whether they want to stop playing.
Less common ways to score include the safety, which is when a player, often due to an overwhelming urge to stop playing American football, runs into his own endzone and is tackled. The health and safety, introduced in the 1990s, is now pointless.
Format[edit | edit source]
The game is split into four quarters, with Beyoncé legally required to sing, or at least pretend to sing, at halftime. The first three quarters are more or less the same in format: each lasts up to 2 hours depending on how much the ball stays in play, how quickly the players decide in the aforementioned huddles if they want to carry on or not, and how long it takes the new Budweiser commercial to go through its cutesy baby horse schtick.
The fourth quarter is entirely different. Two minutes from the end, in a nod to the Cold War climate of the 1950s in which the professional leagues began to take shape, the game stops for a two-minute warning, when everyone on the field and in the crowd is obliged to duck and cover. During the stoppage, a local man dressed up as a stereotypical Russian tries to steal the scoreboard, and he is ceremonially beaten by each team's mascot.
The Final Score[edit | edit source]
Judges decide on which of the two mascots did the best job in Beating the Russian.
The winning mascot wins a red flag for his team, the loser a green flag. The points accrued in the preceding 6 hours are added up by mathematicians and the higher-scoring team is awarded a blue flag, while the lower-scoring team is awarded an orange one. Finally, the nation is invited to vote by telephone; the winners of the phone vote receive a purple flag, the runners-up a yellow one. The overall winner is the team with the darkest-looking collection of flags.
Example of Scoreboard[edit | edit source]
The first Super Bowl was played in Los Angeles in 1967. The Green Bay Packers won easily, despite the initial shock of the scorching 72° February heat causing trouble for the Wisconsinites in the first half. The scoreboard in tonight's game will look much the same, although it is no longer sponsored by Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix.
| Beating the Russian |
On Field Score |
National Phone Vote |
Overall Result | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Green Bay Packers | Green (5.8) | Blue (32) | Purple (56%) | Winner |
| Kansas City Chiefs | Red (5.9) | Orange (10) | Yellow (44%) | Runner-up |