The popularity of NFL

While baseball is known as "America's national pastime," football, in the eyes of many, is the most popular sport in the United States. According to the Harris Poll, Professional Football moved ahead of baseball as the fans' favorite in 1965, during the emergence of the NFL's challenger, the American Football League, as a major Professional Football league. Football has remained America's favorite sport ever since. In a Harris Poll conducted in 2008, the NFL was the favorite sport of as many people (30%) as the combined total of the next three professional sports--baseball (15%), auto racing (10%), and hockey (5%). Additionally, football's American TV viewership ratings now surpass those of other sports, although football season comprises far fewer games than the seasons of other sports. Furthermore, college football is actually the third-most popular sport in the US, with 12% of survey respondents listing it as their favorite. Therefore, fully 42% of Americans consider some level of football their favorite sport.

However, the Harris Poll only allows one unaided selection of a "favorite sport." Other studies and polls such as the ESPN Sports Poll and the studies released by the Associated Press and conducted by Sports Marketing Group from 1988 to 2004, show far higher levels of popularity for NFL Football since they list from thirty to over 100 sports that each respondent must rate. According to the Associated Press, the Sports Marketing Group polls from 1988 to 2004 show NFL Football to be the most popular spectator sport in America. The AP stated that "In the most detailed survey ever of America's sports tastes" researching "114 spectator sports they might attend, follow on television or radio or read about in newspapers or magazines, the NFL topped all sports with 39 percent of Americans saying they loved it or considered it one of their favorites." The total percentage of Americans who liked or loved NFL Football exceeds 60% of the American Public.
The NFL has the highest per-game attendance of any domestic professional sports league in the world, drawing over 67,000 spectators per game for each of its two most recently completed seasons, 2006and 2007. However, the NFL's overall attendance is only approximately 20% of Major League Baseball, due to the latter's longer schedule (162-game scheduled regular season).

The retired NFL star are optimistic about James:If he change to play football, it’s likely to succeed

James is likely to remain a superstar now, but just the superstar of football community. Retired NFL unions players  Mark Murphy and Randy Moss are considered actively that  if James chose rugby, it will must be a success.

On September 20, U.S. local time, LeBron James who is in the midst of truce appeared on the NFL stadium, and kicked off for the game of the Dallas Cowboys and  the New York Giants . With great interest the little emperor also have a go, but he caught the ball off exactly like the slam dunk action.
In St. Vincent St. Mary High School, James had participated in basketball and football these two sports at the same time.In the rugby field,  he served as wide receivers. Owing to excellent physical fitness and athletic ability, James both did well in the two sports. At the second year of high school, he was named to the best high school football team in Ohio; third year, he led the school team reached the semi-final football throughout the state, when the sports commentator has been speculation that he will enter NFL. Until the fourth grade of high school, James  gave up football, and played basketball wholeheartedly.

James, 2.03 m in height and more than 110 kg of body weight, plus his performance with the powerful explosive and impact force on the basketball court , is an important reasons of American longing for his appearance in the football stadium. At the beginning of  this year, James put on football dress and shoot for an insurance company’s football theme advertising . Then, ESPN has also produced a large-scale project specially to exploring the possibility of James to play NFL.

Why I’m Excited For the 2010 NFL Season

Summer in New Orleans, as you probably know, is not the most comfortable experience.
Other cities in the United States are hot, but the heat in sub-tropic New Orleans is so soupy that you break into a sweat picking up the newspaper from your front lawn. The effect is basically the exact seasonal reverse of the New England Hot Stove tradition; people huddle around air conditioning, think about fall and talk about the Saints.
Since the collective Lombardi Gras hangover wore off sometime around the middle of March, every move (and there haven’t been many) Mickey Loomis and company have made has been thoroughly discussed and debated throughout the city.
While there were a few divisive transactions – the Jammal Brown trade chiefly among them – the biggest problem for Saints fans this summer was that simply isn’t a lot to discuss when your team wins the Super Bowl and then keeps the majority of that team intact. When the backup quarterback situation is one of your team's biggest concerns, your team is probably pretty good. The draft came and went, and the city of New Orleans was left to discuss Patrick Ramsey vs. Chase Daniel for months on end.

With Thursday night’s kickoff, we can finally put an end to all of these quasi-artificial debates and get back to the "us vs. them" tribalism that makes football in America such a big deal.
You don’t have to be familiar with Patrick Robinson’s 40-yard dash time or Jo-Lonn Dunbar’s grasp of Gregg Williams’ defensive schemes to get drunk at your neighborhood bar and cheer for Brett Favre injuries. No matter how nuanced your appreciation of the bottomless intricacies of the sport, everybody loves the completely unnuanced reaction the entire city gives with every Drew Brees touchdown and Darren Sharper intercption.
Controversies real and/or imagined obviously will pop up over the course of the 16-game season, and it will give us here at Blog Blitz plenty of material to riff about. All of that will happen in good time. Right now, I just can’t wait to yell "Who Dat" at random strangers on Canal Street.
It’s been a long summer, and the city is ready for its football.

History of American football

The National Football League was the idea of legendary athlete Jim Thorpe, player-coach of the Canton Bulldogs, and Leo Lyons, owner of the Rochester Jeffersons, a sandlot football team. Both the Jeffersons and the Buffalo All-Stars were barnstorming through Ohio at the time. After Lyons’s Jeffersons played, and lost badly to, Thorpe’s Bulldogs in a 1917 match, Lyons (wanting to build a sport that rivaled Major League Baseball in popularity) suggested to Thorpe that a league be formed. Plans could not be initiated immediately in 1918, due to the Spanish flu quarantines and the loss of players to the Great War, which led to the Bulldogs suspending operations and most other teams either suspending operations or reducing their schedules to local teams.
The next year, however, Lyons started in his home state of New York, challenging a cluster of professional teams in Buffalo to a championship in 1919; the Buffalo Prospects took the challenge and won. Canton was already a part of the unofficial Ohio League, which included teams such as the Bulldogs, the Massillon Tigers, the Shelby Blues and the Ironton Tanks; Thorpe convinced Bulldogs manager Ralph Hay and other Ohio teams to play under a league-style format for 1919, after which the team barnstormed against the Detroit Heralds of Detroit, Michigan and the Hammond Pros of Chicago, Illinois. Other independent clusters of teams were playing at about the same time across Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Indiana; Pennsylvania and New York City also had teams but did not contribute any to the NFL at the time of its founding (especially notable since Pennsylvania is often considered to be the birthplace of professional football; Pennsylvania’s blue laws prevented any teams from that state from joining the league until 1924).

NFL -the largest professional American football league in the world

The National Football League (NFL) is the largest professional American football league in the world. It is an unincorporated/ non-profit organization 501(c)association controlled by its members. It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association (the league changed the name to the National Football League in 1922). The league currently consists of thirty-two teams from the United States. The league is divided evenly into two conferences — the American Football Conference (AFC) and National Football Conference (NFC), and each conference has four divisions that have 4 teams each.
The regular season is a seventeen-week schedule during which each team has one bye week and plays sixteen games. This schedule includes six games against a team’s divisional rivals, as well as several inter-division and inter-conference games. The season currently starts on the Thursday night in the first full week of September (the Thursday after Labor Day) and runs weekly to late December or early January.
At the end of each regular season, six teams from each conference play in the NFL playoffs, a twelve-team single-elimination tournament that culminates with the championship game, known as the Super Bowl. This game is held at a pre-selected site which is usually a city that hosts an NFL team. Commercials during the Super Bowl tend to be quite popular among the general public. Selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, held in Honolulu, Hawaii; up to and including 2009, this game took place the weekend after the Super Bowl. In 2010, it will take place the week prior to the Super Bowl, in Miami Gardens, Florida.