Hello, welcome to the lazy genius podcast. I am Kendra Dachie and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

Today we're doing something a little different. This is a bonus episode. We might start playing around with some of these that are like deeply specific kinds of episodes in the future or it might just be this one.

I don't know, but I have had enough of you ask me to explain football that I'm going to do a little bonus episode on understanding football. Now let me be clear here. I am not an expert. I am not an athlete. I have never I have never been able to successfully throw a spiral and I cannot adequately explain what a nickel and dime offense is without asking someone or the internet for clarification.

I don't know everything about football, mostly because no one does. Football is like really complex. There are so many variations and plays and nuances and but you don't have to know all of those in order to enjoy or understand the basics.

So that is what we're going to do today. I'm going to explain the basics of football, mostly what the downs mean. That's what gets you. It's just so many numbers and they're very inconsistent. But I do love, love making football more palatable for people who like to sit on the couch on a Sunday afternoon or on a Thanksgiving day afternoon and not feel completely lost.

Football becomes way more fun as a viewer once you understand the basics. So let's talk about the basics. Okay, here we go. Ready? Number one. I'm going to go real basic. The objective here is to score more points than the other team.

Now, this is the foundation of most sports endeavors. You want to score points and you want to score more than the other guys. There is one broadway that you score points in football. And that is that you move the football as a team from your end of the field or your territory into the other guys territory like enemy territory.

And when you cross the line, when you cross a specific boundary with the football, you get points. Now how you cross that boundary determines how many points you get. Okay.

So the two main ways that you actually score points in football are a touchdown and a field goal. A touchdown is when your team moves the football across the actual goal line.

The goal line is when the field like literally when you're watching the NFL, the field moves from green to like very colorful. Every field has two goal lines.

One at each end one for each team. And if the ball crosses that goal line in an appropriate football way, you know, then the team scores a touchdown. A touchdown is worth six points. Now you might be like, no wait, I thought I touched down with seven points.

Because scoring a touchdown is the hardest way to score in football. It's like you get a prize after when a team scores a touchdown, they get like a bonus turn. It's kind of like bowling a strike. You get a strike, you get another chance to go. You get a bonus turn.

The same is true when you score a touchdown of football. You score a six point touchdown and then you get a choice. You get a choice to either kick an extra point, which is exactly what it sounds like. You kick the ball through the goal post at that field.

And if the ball goes through those goal posts, you get an extra point. You kick an extra point. Now your other choice is you can score two extra points.

If you choose what is called a two point conversion, that is when the ball starts at a specific part of the field that's very, very close to the goal line. And the team has one chance, only one chance to get the ball over the goal line.

It's kind of like the team has a chance to score another touchdown, but you just get two points for it instead of six. So the main way that you score in football that you will see is a touchdown followed by an extra point. That's usually how things go. That's why most touchdowns are thought of as being worth seven points.

Okay, are you with me with me so far? Okay, the other main way that you can score in football is if you kick a field goal, a field goal is when you kick the ball from wherever you are on the field.

And if that ball goes through those big yellow goal posts at the end of the field, then you get three points. Now the closer you are to the goal posts, the more likely you are to score a field goal, which is again three points.

Okay, now there is one other way to score in football and that is a safety, which is worth two points, but we're not going to get into that quite yet. What we need to understand now is how you move the ball down the field.

Okay, so imagine you have the offense of one team versus the defense of the other, right? The offense has the ball. They are in charge of the ball. That is called possession.

They have possession of the football. You'll hear that a lot. Now that is unless they become very careless and they lose that possession, which is called a turnover. They lost their turn. The other team gets a turn now.

Now, if you think about movement of a ball and other sports, most sports have rules about how you do that, about how you move the ball. Like in basketball, you have to dribble or pass.

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