According to NFL rules, to get points in American football you have to score a touchdown, kick a field goal, get a two point conversion, kick an extra point or force the other team into a safety, for six, three, two, one and two points respectively.
You score a touchdown when a ball carrier gets the “pigskin” into the endzone, which gives the scoring team a chance to either kick an extra point or go for two, which often leads to somehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f13ahvYl0PE&t=169s.
Kickers are getting so good now they can reliably make field goals from beyond 50 yards, despite it being a somewhat complicated and finger-risking enterprise.
To score a touchdown you need to advance the ball down the field, enabled through a single forward pass or multiple backwards passes, a rule that Tay Tays boyfie Travis rightfully admonishes is an underutilised action.
You don’t have to score a touchdown with one play though - you start with four downs, or lives, a marker for which is ten yards away from where the ball begins at start of possession. Don’t make it the ten yards, you have to give the ball over. Make the ten yards, and your yard counter starts again. Sometimes it’s safer to punt the ball away if you think you can’t possibly make the first down marker, but attempting a field goal is preferable to that if you’re close enough. If you're really backed up near your own end zone, you might get tackled in that region, which is called a safety. That's a pretty rare occurrence though.
The appeal of the sport is that it's essentially violent chess, where generally massive athletes crash into each other every play, with a fair amount of finesse required. Set plays are often highly choreographed and there's a language within the sport that even experts such as myself (see my Underrated Sports Vids channel as evidence of this claim) don't really understand as they are often secret codes to bamboozle the opposition.
There are more nuanced rules, such as the time continues if a player is tackled to the ground in the field of play and vice versa; if a player is holding the ball for a second or so and loses it, the ball is fair game for anyone to obtain possession; blockers can’t hold their opponents; passers can’t throw forwards once beyond the line of scrimmage; if the defense catches a pass on the full it’s an interception and possession changes sides. But the game is essentially a battle of attrition where great gains can be made from long passes or generally smaller gains can be made from the safer option of running. The closer you are to the posts you’re facing, the higher chance you’ll score points.
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