4th and long. Very long.

Today one of my bosses Leonard and I decided that in honor of "Sporting Friday" we would teach the girls in the office how to play "American" football.  I was very excited at the opportunity to toss around the pigskin since no one over here likes American football.  Leonard brought out some cones to square off a field and brought me out to help him teach everyone how to play.  I was a great ambassador for the sport in my opinion, making sure to put those hours of playing Madden to good use.  After spending about half an hour stretching, seriously, the team was ready to play.  The girls were so excited to learn the rules of the game and see if they were any good.  I will save you the anticipation, they were not, but they had never played before so it was understable.  We taught them how to hold and throw the football, and catching wasn't so difficult because they have played sports before. 

After some warm ups we decided to split up into teams and start to play.  Questions were flying back and forth from offense to defense on what they were supposed to do.  Trying to explain what a line of scrimmage was turned out to be hopeless because they just blitzed everytime and lined up wrong.  They actually blitzed while counting the 5 one-thousands. (I wanted to explain that it should be mississippi's, but it seemed too confusing) Their first stint on offense resulted in no completed plays from scrimmage, unless you count passes that bounced first and then were picked up and run with.  Their first defensive showing was a little better, but they were trying to figure out how to guard or "mark" their opponent.  We still scored on the first pass because our reciever just ran by everyone and I didn't feel bad about it at all.  The game started to get a little better until they started to forget what the cones symbolized and started running (while screaming at the top of their lungs) out of bounds and then in bounds multiple times. We called this the kamikazee attack.  While on offense, I was being blitzed by one of the girls when she ended up punching me in the balls.  The funny thing was she didn't seem that upset about it, and I was kind of proud of the cheap shot. 

The game went on, and the girls started calling their own huddles and designing plays!  There were draw plays, go routes, crossing patterns, and QB sneaks.  I could not believe my eyes.  They were learning this game so quick and they were getting better!  They were knocking down passes and anticipating a quarterback's under-thrown pass for interceptions.  Now granted they didn't always catch the ball, and some were still confused, but overall I was very very impressed with how quickly they all picked up the game.  And at the end, when we asked them what they all thought, they couldn't wait to play again.  I think we may finally have taken (American) football international!