Aussie Rules Football and American Football

Let me say this first, I like to watch American football and I have been watching NFL games for years. But I don’t like the conservative and ignorant nature of most American football fans. What I mean is a lot of them think that American football and other American sports are the greatest in the world and dismiss other sports and cultures as “for pussies”. Even though that is bothersome from time to time, I still think that American football is a fascinating sport. That is, until I discovered Aussie Rules football.

It was a cold Friday night/Saturday morning last year, and I got home late (probably from drinking). I go to the basement, turn on my TV, and start flipping through the sports channels, until I saw “AFL Grand Final”. Intrigued, I flip to that station to see that it was actually Aussie Rules football. I’ve never seen a match before, and I had time to kill, so after a quick read of the rules on the internet, I was ready to watch my first AFL game.

What I noticed in the AFL is that there are very limited stoppages in the sport, which I completely enjoyed. I was pretty annoyed of the constant stoppages whenever I watched NFL. I was tired of seeing 5 seconds of action then seeing 30 seconds of the players doing practically nothing, along with the constant commercials that go with an NFL game. Did you know that for a 3-hour broadcast of an American football game, the football is actually in play for a grand total of 10 minutes? It’s a real stat, look it up. Another thing I noticed is the limited equipment that AFL players wear, as opposed to the number of equipment that American football players wear. Also, the scores you see in AFL games are almost what you see in basketball games, while the scores in American Football games are significantly less. Other than that, both sports still have that rough nature.

Watching that first AFL game pretty much killed any interest I had in American football.  Aussie rules is a free-flowing sport, which is right up my alley. I don’t like sports to be interrupted constantly, because it doesn’t keep the watcher intrigued, and quickly leads to boredom. There isn’t a market for AFL in Canada, so the likelihood that I will end up catching another game is pretty slim, but it was incredible while I watched it. I will never look at American football the same way again. I probably won’t watch an American football game again.