A Timeout, Not a Warning
For America’s Most Exhilarating Brand of Football, Many Times, the Final Two Minutes Are the Most Fantastic.
No, don’t call it a warning. It’s a timeout (a timeout not charged to either team, that is).
Baseball may be America’s game, but football — born here in a unique hybrid of soccer and rugby — is America’s passion.
And the here part might be closer than you think.
The 2024 College Football season includes a stoppage of play at the 2:00 mark of the fourth quarter. Like the NFL, play is stopped with 2 minutes left in the game, but it is a timeout that is not charged to either team.
Pennsylvania’s fields and local stadiums echo in mid-summer afternoon practices that give way right around Labor Day to Friday night frenzy and Saturday morning spectacular matchups whose displays of athleticism can be savored with coke and hotdog for only a nominal fee. On Sundays, the NEL—the pinnacle of football in the world, including the most-watched NFL franchise, the Eagles—captures Philadelphia’s focus.
PHOTO: WikiCommons
But it’s on Saturdays — when college football — devoid of any multi-million dollar player contracts and with only the loyalty of the opportunity of being chosen from a field of 81,000 other NCAA players for the possibility to elevate to the NFL — can be enjoyed. In 1869 — just four years after the end of the American Civil War that claimed nearly 620,000 lives and sixty miles north of Philadelphia — the first ever football game was played between the College of New Jersey (now Rutgers) and who beat Princeton 6–4 (two field goals vs two safeties?)
That game was a college football game.
In 2023, Penn’s Football Team, playing in the shadow of the oldest college football stadium in America (Franklin Field), went 6–4, including six games decided by one possession. One of those was a thrilling 42–39 overtime win against Georgetown on October 7th. Nearby West Chester University had five contests decided by one possession.
An additional stoppage of play warning us in the thrilling last two minutes of an NCAA contest on the gridiron only adds to the autumn weekend brand of football that is already our most exciting, even though it is, in fact, a timeout, not a warning.
PHOTO: WikiCommons
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