h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Preseason is upon us, and the speculations have begun. Early polls say the Vikings are the champs this year, edging out the Broncos. Any alternate opinions? And who will be the best quarterback taken out of this draft? Is Tim Couch the next John Elway, or the next Heath Shuler?

Week one of the NFL season is complete, and I am looking like a genius. After the preseason, the Jets were the leading candidate for Super Bowl glory. Vinnie Testaverde is gone for the season, and Rick Mirer is with his 4th team in as many years. Meanwhile, my Miami Dolphins dismantled the reigning champs on Monday night. Who's headed for the big dance now? Go Fish!!

HOw

Hmmmm.... That was weird.
Anyways, the season has reached halfway, and beyond, and the Rams seems to be heading towards the playoffs.
Maybe we saw a prelude to the Super Bowl this past sunday, as St. Louis met the Tennessee Titans.
Any thoughts on that???

No one can argue that Tennessee isn't a quality team. This week's game in Miami could possibly be an AFC Championship preview, since both the Titans and the Dolphins are 6-1.

As for the Rams...they are not for real. Sure, they'll get into the playoffs, but don't be suprised if they get "upset" by someone like Dallas or Washington. Tennessee is the first team St. Louis has played all season that has a winning record. In fact, going into this weekend's action, the Rams' 6 previous opponents had a grand total of only 8 wins! And there is only one more team on their schedule that currently has a winning record. The fact is, tough season's breed tough teams. The Rams are not gonna be tough. Whoever emerges from that extremely talented AFC is going to destroy the NFC opponent, beit Miami, Tennessee, Jacksonville, or (hah!) New England.

Hello there, sports fans.
Long over due, the report on the NFLEL.
Rhein Fire seems to be heading for the World Bowl in Frankfurt, but who will join them?
The Scottish Claymores took a decisive step closer to the big game as they clobbered the Amsterdam Admirals this past weekend, placing them at an undisputed second place in the league.
Will the coming weekend's bash at Hampden Park be a prelude to the World Bowl, as the Scottish Claymores take on the Rhein Fire in Glasgow? Only time can tell.
Who will win the QB battle? Tennessee Titans' allocated Kevin Daft, or the former Heissman Trophy winner Danny Wuerffel, released from the New Orleans Saints?
Who will win the WR showdown? Dallas Cowboys allocated Jeff Ogden for Fire or Sulecio Sanford, allocated from the Chicago Bears, for the Claymores?
Who will come out on top in the RB war? Tampa Bay allocated Aaron Stecker for the Claymores or Pepe Pearson for the Rhein side?
Will the No. 1 ranked Defense of the Claymores, the 'Hounds of Scotland', be able to stop the onslaught of the No 1 ranked Fire Offense?

The questions are many and the answers will come on Saturday, at Hampden Park, Glasgow, Scotland.

Sorry 'bout this. I just had to write something down about it.

Not a problem... and thanks for not pointing out what an idiot my prognostications on the NFL made me out to be... (mutters obscenities and imprecations about the Titans coach, who idiotically turned his grind-it-out offense into a passing attack for three-quarters of the Super Bowl... led by a quarterback with happy feet and a weak arm.)

Unfortunately, though, I have nothing to add to the current conversation. NFLEurope only gets coverage on obscure cable and satellite networks in the States, and I am currently without either.

It's a pity that you haven't got access to the NFLEL games. After all, this is where the NFL teams send their people to grow as players and to return with more experience and confidence than they would have as non-starters in the NFL.
The obvious proof of that is Kurt Warner, who played in the NFLEL, and see where that got him.

I honestly thought about pointing out that my 'very' unqualified hunch proved to be correct, but I thought that it was long forgotten so I found no apparent reason to mention it.
I just wish I had thought of betting on that.

The teams that will fight it out foor the World Bowl in Frankfurt has been named. The Scottish Claymores will take on the Rhein Fire.
This past weekend, we had a preview of that matchup, as the Claymores scored the winning TD with 15 seconds to go in the fourth quarter to defeat Rhein Fire 31-24.

Now I only wish that I could go to Frankfurt to experience the World Bowl experience. I mean, it's one thing to be at Hampden Park to watch the two teams face each other with 10,000 people in the stands, but it's a totally different thing to see them face each other at the Waldstadion in Frankfurt, playing for the gold and the glory, and there's 40,000+ people cheering on.
I just gotta be there...

I'm glad to see this kind of thing beginning to catch on. Not many Europeans share our love of American football... it seems to me that they feel the same for it that most Americans feel for Assosciation football. I think the biggest problem is that the teams and coaches are, as near as I can tell, exclusively American. If there were actual Scots playing for the Claymores, the locals could get behind their team. International competition, anyone?

Of course, it's entirely possible that, once the rest of the world takes up our game, we will proceed to get our butts kicked at it. When was the last time Canada won a medal in hockey?

It is true, that there are a lot of American players in the NFLE League, but there is the special rule that says that each team has to have at least 5 (I think) "National" players in the roster. Now, the National players don't necessarily have to be Scottish to play in the Scottish Claymores team, the only rule is (I think) that they can't be American. Therefor, there's a bunch of Japanese players around the NFLE rosters, as well as other nationalities.
The Claymores' most acknowledged National players are Scott "Scoop" Cooper (WR) from Glasgow, and Rob Hart (K) from Southampton, England. They also have an Australian Punter, Jon Ballantyne, who plays Aussie Rules football as well as American Football.

The Scottish Claymores has got a pretty good market value in Scotland, even during the off-season, sponsoring a flag football league and several "grass root" tournaments every year, with appearances by the Claymores players. The team also organises get-togethers for fans at the start of the NFL season, with theme-days and gatherings for the opening games, as well as Supwer Bowl parties in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Also, the university leagues are coming on pretty strong with more and more students opting to go for Amferican Football instead of Rugby.

Yeah, I remember several years ago when, in a much ballyhoo'ed move, the San Diego Chargers acquired an Aussie Rules star to do their punting. His name escapes me at the moment, but it was a pleasant change to see a punter that didn't fall down like a girl when the punt returner got too close.

That's how they do it... they get into the community first, and then the game gets into your skin.

I think my interest in the game was awoken several years ago, when the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears (not sure about the Bears, though) played an exhibition game in Gothenburgh, and they showed it on the telly. I have no idea of what the score was, or even who won, but it got me a bit interested. Then, a couple of years after that, a friend of mine who was already hooked on the game (9ers-fan in the early 90's) showed me some games he had recorded and after that, I was hooked on the game as well. I almost applied for the local team in my hometown as they just started out (The Unicorns), but I decided that a 16-year-old that wasn't really fit would get to play in a team consisting of university guys averaging about 3 years older, so I didn't go for it. In hind sight, I wish I had. Oh well.

The Unicorns weren't really successful anyways, but it would've been fun.

Playing is what got me hooked. I was already a sports fan as a young tike, mostly baseball. Anyway, when I was 9, my mom asked me if I wanted to play. I'd never watched a game, and the only thing I knew about it was that it was violent. To make a long story short, I spent the next three years learning the game... the more I became involved with in playing, the more I watched it on tv. I quit playing after those three years, though, on account of the fact that the other boys were growing a whole lot quicker than I was (family trait.... the men stay small until about 15 or so), so I found my outlet by playing full-contact and padless with my friends on Sundays, after we watched the early game. It became almost a religion for us.

The sucky thing, though, is that I've never gotten a chance to see my favorite team play live. I live in the LA area, and there are no more teams here, and for good reason... they were both horrible franchises that managed to alienate the people here. I was always a Miami Dolphins fan (odd that, considering that I like the home teams in every other major sport... but as I said, both the Raiders and Rams were unpalatable), and now that there is no football in LA, I can't even go root for them as the visiting team. Still, I did get to see the Pro Bowl in Hawaii a couple of years ago.

The closest I have ever come to an NFL-game was probably when I was in the US and drove past a couple of stadia in early June a couple of years ago. Drove past the Falcons' stadium in Atlanta, the Saints' Stadium in New Orleans and The Panthers' stadium in Charlotte. I did a heck of a lot of driving while I was in the US back then.

A colleague of mine here in Scotland was about to start playing with the Glasgow University team last year. Never got round to it, since it meant that he had to enroll in the university and he didn't have any money to do that at the time. HE did play a scrimmage match, though. Must've been pretty funny to see him as a defensive player when his primary position is WR. I think they put him in as a LB or a FS or something.

Frankfurt plans got spoiled yesterday, as the airline that had a great deal on flights there all of a sudden increased the prices from 29 pounds return ticket to 120 pounds. So I guess I'll have to wait til next year. Maybe even try to get money enough to go to the Super Bowl. Now, that would be really cool.

I've done something even funnier. I got into a flag football league for a while when I was 19 (flag football means no pads but no tackling... you wear a belt with two flags dangling off that are pulled by defenders to stop you. Of course, enthusiastic defenders will often tackle first, then pull the flags, and all the rest of the contact still goes), and it was a small league, so everybody played two-way. On offense, I played WR, because that's what my build and my skills dictated. However, on defense, they wanted to put me on a corner or safety, but I went ahead and lined up on the defensive line for a few plays. There I am, all 150 lbs of me at the time, lined up directly across from a guard and a tackle nearly twice my size. But I was so quick off the snap that the lumbering behemoths couldn't get to their feet before I was shouldering my way past them and sprinting at the quarterback. When that got tiresome, one of the linebackers and I would fake stunts and blitzes and confuse the hell out of the guys, making my job even easier. Of course, you can't do this kind of thing with that much success with an organized team like in school or anything, but it was a lot of fun at the time, and seeing everyone on the other team watching me harass their quarterback and shaking their heads just made my day. The people on my team shook their heads just as much, but they were all smiles when they did it. Of course, we still always lost... our offense was horrible.

Trip to the Super Bowl: good luck. That stuff is priced so high in the stratosphere that the only working stiffs who get to go are the ones who win tickets in some sort of sweepstakes. And that's for a native who can just drive to the game.

That flag football league sounds like a lot of fun. I think that the Claymores sponsors some flag football league around here somewhere. Not sure though, and I think it's just for high school kids.

Anyways, last year, my pal and I saw trips to the Supwer Bowl, including flight over, accomodation, tickets to the game and a whole lot of other goodies, and it cost about 2,700 pounds. I'm not totally sure of the conversion from pounds to US dollars, but I think that 2,700 pounds is something like 5,500 US dollars.
Not too bad for most things included..
Probably really shitty seats, though. But then again, it's the Super Bowl, so why care if it's shitty seats, at least you're there, right?

Sorry for a little off topic posting but I'm just amased that there is someone else in here who have heard of that league. I played for it myslef for three years with the Stirling University Clansmen and it was great fun.

I had my first taste of flag football a couple of weeks ago. The Scottish Claymores hosted an "NFL Kick-off Carnival" in Glasgow on the 3rd of September, and a couple of guys from work thought it'd be fun to join in the 5-on-5 Flag football tournament that was the main event of that Kick-Off Carnival. So, six of us registered a team where only two of us had played any type of American football before, we had about two and a half hours of training and a whole lot of fun.
And we didn't lose that many games. we went through the tournament 2-2-0, beating the CLaymores office staff in the process.
Best fun I'd had for a long time.

And for this season in the NFL: Will the Rams repeat their success story of last year? Will the Bucs be the first team in NFL history to play in a Super Bowl that they host? Will Dallas end up with a record worse than the Bengals?
The questions are many and unanswered...

My personal opinion, rams were a one off. Any team that only narrowly beats the seahawks (My team of preference) are going nowhere. As fr dallas, well, from all teh fans I know I can rest comfortable knowing at least that I'll admit when my team won't make the playoffs. And teh bucs, I've heard alot of teh smart moneys on them, but you can't discount the giants.