SUPERBOWL - Tell me all about it!

They start a new quarter, there's a coin-toss, and whoever scores first wins the game. It's a huge advantage to win the coin toss, because all they have to do is get close enough to kick a field goal.

I haven't played soccer in years but I have fond memories of playing goalie for my public school in Wales.Well not that fond, those little buggers used to kick me without provocation.
American soccer has a shoot-out system for breaking ties. I don't know what they do in Premier League.

Premier League usually goes like this (for finals only):

extra time, then penalty shoot out. They keep taking penalties until one team has 5 goals. If scores are still level they keep on going until someone misses.

"Neon" Deion Sanders and Emmitt Smith played for the Cowboys.

Sounds the same

In European and World Cup finals it goes as follows:

extra time, then golden goal (sudden death) - there are no penalty shoot outs.

Thanks. I couldn't remember which team it was, although I did watch the game. Excellent!

Cardiff, Swansea, Wrexham?

Bibliophile,
Why the sudden interest in the Super Bowl? You know of course that your science buddy, farmerman, is a Philadelphia Eagles fan. Are you planning a wager with him? What if he notices that you are asking for predictions on this thread?

I love to watch the Superbowl - even if it means staying up to 4am! I guess I like the American razzmatazz.

He's an Eagles fan? Oops - I'll save that for when they get beaten.

What is the official kick off time for the game? (EST)

I always thought the Superbowl was played on the last Sunday in January! Why is it in February this year?

some facts
http://www.superbowl.com/features/general_info

I played for Atlantic College(Bridgend) against schools in Cardiff and Swansea

Interesting stats over there, Panzade. Thanks.

I still don't understand why the game is in February this time!!

I'm not sure but I THINK the season started a week later than usual but I'm not sure. It would make sense. The same think happened in 2001 (game in february) but that was because of september11th.

Re: SUPERBOWL - Tell me all about it!


Pro football in America is primarily about throwing the football and catching it. The way the pro game operates, running is still part of the offense, but a secondary part.

That REALLY depends on the team gunga.

I think Corey Dillon of the Patriots will rush for more yards since, as far as rushing yards are concerned, he is superior.

As usual gunga, you're misinformed :wink:

If what you say was true, Manning would have led the colts to a Super Bowl victory. But instead, the Patriots humbled them with a balanced attack. Rarely does a team win a SB without a running game.

Actually, Indy had the best running back of any of those three teams. Edgerrin James kicks major butt. They just didn't have a chance to use him, got in a hole early and had to throw.

To my way of thinking the basic pro running game is ineffectual more or less by design, basically intended to slog out a few yards here and there and keep quarterbacks from being rushed any harder than necessary. The main problem is that the quarterback is basically not contributing anything to the play so it's ten men versus eleven from jump.

The seventies were a pretty forgettable decade in most respects, but for sports enthusiasts, the seventies had several special kinds of things to offer. There's something special about watching a true master do something, and knowing that nobody will ever see it done better, i.e. that you are seeing some difficult feat being done as well as it is humanly possible to do. There were at least three things like that going on in the seventies, or three which seemed to stand out: Jimmy Conners hitting groundstrokes, Roberto Duran boxing, and Paul Bear Bryant playing football.

Zone pass defenses seemed to come in somewhere back in the fifties and sixties. The NFL adapted by using older and older quarterbacks as it began to take more time to learn how to throw against the zones, and to learn when not to throw the ball. Colleges didn't have that option since in the college game, quarterbacks graduate every four years, at least in theory. There were a number of years in the early 60s when national college championship football games were being won by scores of 6 - 3 or 10 - 6. The game was becomming boring.

And then, in the late 60s, the colleges began to develop running games so powerful, that they didn't need to worry about pass defenses, zone or otherwise. For the first six or ten years of the wishbone, TV camera crews were consistently being fooled and following the wrong guy down the field. For over a decade, the two most powerful football conferences (Big 8 and SEC) were dominated by wishbone teams. But only one guy ever totally made a science out of it and that was Paul Bear Bryant. The Florida teams eventually started lining up against the Okies with 11 men on the line of scrimmage and the Okies were not able to figure it out.

Any time anybody ever did that against Bryant's teams it was an automatic seven points; that simply put Ozzie Newsome and two other gifted receivers out against man coverage with Richard Todd or Jeff Rutledge throwing the ball to them. Bryant had somehow or other devised a passing game keyed to the action of the wishbone and it was not possible to tell when they were throwing. When the tide went to throw the ball, it did not look like a desparation act; it looked like something they practiced and were good at, and figured to do 20 times a game. Any number of their games started off with the other team lining up nine or ten guys close to the line of scrimmage. The score six minutes later would be 14 - 0, and then they would start keeping corners and safeties back far enough to cover passes, and then the wishbone would roll over them. It was not possible to defense both parts of the thing.

Bryant won two national titles with that system in the final few years before he died. That was the only time in my life I thought I was seeing a situation in which an amateur version of a sport had outgrown the professional version. I still believe that if there had been a college all-star game at that time with Bryant coaching the all-stars, i.e. if some NFL defensive unit had had to try to survive a sixty minute look at that Alabama wishbone, it's possible that the NFL could have been seriously embarassed.

Gunga, if Bryant's system were so infallible, how do you explain the 1972 Sugar Bowl? As I recall, 'Bama got seriously blown out, and the Big Eight (Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Colorado) finished 1-2-3 in the final polls.