Sports

Life Imitates Football

Some useful phrases that will help you on and off the field

The last college football game I attended was in 2006, when UCLA played Stanford at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. It was a somewhat nominal game, which is probably how I wound up with free tickets. I have very few guiding principles in my life, but this is one of them: Never turn down anything free. This probably does a lot to explain why all of my umbrellas keep getting swallowed by piles of extra large t-shirts and small foam balls. Hmm.

I went to the game with three exchange students I had just met: Ike and Haye were from Holland, and Annie was Norwegian. Despite being the only American in the bunch, I was still somehow the least informed as to the happenings on the field.

By halftime, Haye had apparently grown tired of my incessant stream of inquiries. "Listen," he said from beneath his extensively moussed Euro mullet, speaking slowly in between drags of his Lucky Strike. "You're American. Isn't this sort of your thing?"

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Apparently, it was not. And now, come Saturday, I will be embarking on my first college football experience in four years. Yes, Virginia: I will be attending the Maryland - Duke game.

Determined not to exhibit the same gaping ignorance as last time, I decided to do some last minute boning-up on my football knowledge, which, as we have established, currently totals 0.

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In order to do so, I called my friend Ryan, who possesses both exceptional patience and a proselytizing devotion to football. So invested is Ryan in my football edification that he dragged me to a 49ers game just before I moved to the East Coast, determined to instill in me some sense of California sports pride before I disappeared from his sight. "Don't ever become a Redskins fan," he hissed at me as we said our goodbyes.

I asked him to teach me some terms that would enable me to converse with my fellow football-goers in ways slightly more substantive than "Is this over yet? I need a beer." This is what he told me: 

Audible: "Pfft." I thought when Ryan first introduced it. "I may not know football, but I know English. Gawd."

It turns out that the term "audible," most often heard in the phrase "calling an audible" has use beyond its standard dictionary definition.

As I understand it, an audible can be called when the quarterback decides to change things up at the line of scrimmage. Maybe he doesn't care for the opposing team's formation, Ryan said, and wants to run a different play. In any case, you can use this phrase in every day parlance to indicate an abrupt change. For example, "I thought that guy was hot, but I called an audible when I saw him in the light" to "I was just about to buy a gently used Kia Sedona, but I called an audible when I read that the Honda Odyssey has slightly better fuel economy and 12 percent more cup holders."

Red Zone: Being in the "red zone" sounds like a bad thing but, depending on the situation, it's probably not. In football, the red zone is the final 20 yards between the oneself and the opponent's goal line. And as everyone (yes, even me) knows, reaching the goal line means one thing: TOUCHDOWN. Life may not have touchdowns, per se,  but it's full of satisfying approximations: the last test during finals week, the last mile of a marathon, finally putting the finishing touches on that ice sculpture you've spent all morning making. In Ryan's case, he could aptly have said "I was in the red zone with this project my boss assigned me, until Lauren called me and made me talk to her about football for an hour."

Man Up: Once upon a time, I studied abroad in Budapest, Hungary. Like all good students, my friends and I had a motto, a simple turn of phrase that could pull us out of our exhausted and hung-over stupors and convince us that it actually was a good idea to drive to Austria after a night of partying. The five words that did it, every time, were these: "Man up and power through."

According to an article that ran earlier this month in the New York Times, "man up" may not have always been synonymous with "stop being such a wimp." Apparently in the mid '80s, the head coach of the New York Jets used the phrase to describe his team's successful man-t0-man coverage : "They're playing the kind of defense that I wanted and that Bud Carson teaches — aggressive, man up, getting after it, hustling all over the field." By 1987, however, "man up" had morphed fully to its current meaning. Curious as to whether the term had a feminine counterpart, I began typing "woman up" into my Google search bar, and was offered the phrase "woman upset over chicken nuggets." Aren't we all.   

So this Saturday, I plan to man up and go to this football game, even if I'd rather call an audible and go to Cornerstone instead. But really, there's no way of knowing what I'll do until I've reached the red zone. 

 

 


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