What is the recreational / amateur game like in the US for your football? Is it common for average Joes in their 20s and 30s to play at weekends?
It’s obviously a high impact game, but so is rugby and that is well represented at the amateur level here in the UK.
Anecdotally, I lived in the US for two years and never heard anyone talk about playing the game as an enthusiast. Met plenty of people who had played in School of College, but didn’t encounter anyone who played it as a recreation.
How big a production is it to get a game together? You would have to get the yardage issue worked out I suppose, so would need a decent field with markings.
You aren’t going to see a ton of full contact recreational football due to the equipment required (helmets, pads, etc), relatively high chance of significant injury compared to most other recreational sports, and the fact that while many people have the physical ability to both play and recover from such a game in high school, that number has gone way down by the time you’re talking about guys in their 30s. And probably some other stuff I missed.
What you will see are a bunch of people playing less contact-intensive versions of the game. “Two-hand touch” is a standard rule for a lot of backyard or pickup games (where touching the ball carrier with both hands “tackles” them), and most organized adult recreational leagues that I’ve seen are flag football (where everyone wears a belt with flags attached, and pulling one off the ball carrier is the tackle).
I play flag football every fall in an organized town rec league and it’s a TON of fun.
When you have to work to make a living.you can not afford to play tackle football. That is why touch football came along. But that is a game of speed ,so you have a short shelf life in that too.
I played in organized 7-on-7 leagues for a few years after finishing college. I blew out my ACL when I was 24, and it took a year to get back on the field after that. My rebuilt knee held up pretty well, but I was never the same after coming back - I was never sure if it was the knee or just being out of the game for a year. I quit playing organized ball at 27, but I still play pickup games here and there.
As for yardage, you can just use the pace count of a selected player who’ll walk off the yardage as the start of the drive and drop, say, a tshirt as a marker. The bounds are usually just a sidewalk or a line of trees or something. The endzones are often “past that telephone pole” or “my yard and Jimmy’s yard”. Since it’s tough to find an area that’s actually 100 yards long, a short field can be used and the side with the ball only has 4 downs to score, no first downs.
When only a few people are playing, there’s often an all-time quarterback (usually the best player) who’s permanently on offense. If there’s not enough people to cover him, he’s usually not allowed to run but can’t be tackled either. The offensive line is simulated by making the linebackers count off a set number of seconds before they’re allowed to rush the passer. With these rules, it only takes 3 players to make a game.
Another common work-around is to just ignore yardage entirely, and use an alternate rule like “three completed passes is a first down”.
Also, pick-up games usually lack some or all of the kicking game: There’s almost never field goals or point-afters, and sometimes no punts or kickoffs (those are sometimes thrown instead of kicked).
I played football in high school, but the college I attended didn’t have a football team…I did play some intramural flag football there. Haven’t played it recreationally since except with my nephews and nieces at Christmas.
We played about 300 games of touch football in grades 6-9. Well, maybe 150. A lot. But as said above, it was two hand touch, with a Nerf football, no running game, and sometimes the extra point was throwing the ball at the telephone wires. We also had a three person version with one person being all-time quarterback, and a points system for the defense.
As a kid, we would play football almost every decent weather day in the fall and winter. As an adult, if I play in a pick up touch football game, I have to be the quarterback because I can’t run as much as I used to. A lot of guys in their 20’s and 30’s are more likely to play pick-up or league softball or pick-up basketball games. League soccer for adults seems to be getting more popular in my town.
I grew up in Texas where football is taken very seriously. I graduated in '73 and our high school had Astroturf long before many NFL (NFC?) teams did.
This is very nearly correct. Our pick-up game rule were (are):
No running - passing only
Two forward passes completed for the first down
End zones were what was available and agreed upon
There were no pads but full tackle.
All of that said, most games were organized after a good rain.
