Take the challenge and test your football knowledge!

While not a game that everyone can enjoy, American football has a great deal of history, rivalries, and stories in addition to its occasionally nonsensical rules, frequent stoppages, and commercials on Superbowl Sunday that captivates as many as Barcelona against Real Madrid. It’s popularity has long placed it ahead of baseball as “America’s Pastime” and its growing worldwide audience will see the Super Bowl in London before 2020.

With only 32 teams making up the ranks of the professional game for the whole of the United States, the university level fills in a number of holes. Los Angeles, the second largest city in America, doesn’t have a team to call their own while Green Bay, Wisconsin a town of only 100,000 people plays home to the only publicly owned team in any of the four major professional sports in the States.

The scarcity of professional teams has boosted college football’s popularity to levels almost unfathomable to those who have never witnessed a football Saturday in the States. The stadium I grew up mere blocks from held over 80,000 in the 80’s. The team their supporters followed rarely won more than three of their games out of a slate of eleven. Yet, they filled the stadium each week. That same stadium now holds 94,000 and the team wins year in year out. In places like Oklahoma, college football divides the state each week. Both Oklahoma State and the University of Oklahoma have both won a national championship in addition to being the breeding grounds of professional legends. Oklahoma has no professional team but football lives each week. The same could be said for the state of Alabama where Auburn and Alabama (University of) packs large stadiums with fanatics in a method akin to sardines.

Lastly, collegiate football is essential to the development of a player. Unlike basketball, hockey, and baseball, raw talent requires college football. No one is capable of skipping this level. While certain skill players may join the professional ranks early on occasion, there is no skipping college football for the professional ranks without a couple years of experience at the university level. Consequently, college football demands attention.

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