Football 101
“This course is designed for people who want to have a better understanding of what they’re seeing when they watch football games. Whether you want to communicate with your spouse on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in the fall, enjoy William and Mary games, or engage more with your children or grandchildren if they are playing football, this course is for you. During classes, we will define terminology, diagram simple football positions and plays, and watch video of game scenarios. There will be no assigned homework, but we hope you will watch a game or two while you’re taking this class.”
In 2014, my husband Tim and I decided to co-teach a course we called “Football 101” for the Christopher Wren Association (later renamed the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the College of William and Mary). This came about as a result of a conversation we had after we watched a William and Mary football game in the fall of 2013. A woman sitting behind us in the stands commented to her friend something along the lines of “I’ve been watching football for 30 years and I STILL don’t understand what’s going on out there.” As we were walking back to our car after the game, we started talking about that comment; by the time we got back to the car, we had decided to put together a course we would call “Football 101.” We planned to propose it for inclusion in the course offerings of the Christopher Wren Association for the following fall, just in time for football season. The picture at the top of this essay is from one of the slides we put together; the italicized paragraph under it is the course description as it appeared in the catalog.
We worked for a few months putting the course together. Our outline for the three-week course was pretty basic:
Week One — Offense
Week Two — Defense
Week Three — Special Teams
For each class, I was the instructor for the first hour — introducing terminology, explaining some of the basics. Tim was the instructor for the second hour — the “demonstration” section — in which he used a lot of pictures and diagrams of “Xs and Os.” Like this one:
About 60 people took our class — probably evenly divided between people who truly didn’t know much about football and other people who had played football and wanted to relive their glory years.
It was a hoot. Tim handed the ball off to me to demonstrate that part of the game. He passed the ball to one of the members of the class when it was time to do that. And so forth. As I said, we used a lot of video, and, since the class was meeting during football season, we encouraged the people in the class to watch football over the weekend to see if they could recognize the things we were talking about.
Just to let you know how serious we were about this — here’s the opening image from our PowerPoint presentation for the third session of the class (Special Teams: Kicking and Return Teams):
The class was a success. We enjoyed it so much that we followed it with a course called “Basketball 101” the following year.
I’ve taught a lot of Osher classes since this class. Most of them are pretty academic, focused on history or politics. But this one was just pure fun.