The evolution of backyard football is certainly a sight to behold. As youngsters imitating our favorite players, we formed teams based on friends and would completely engage in athletic warfare with our counterparts, the infamous “them.” Touchdowns would be celebrated by mocking our opponents and saying ridiculous things we heard on television (during many grade school games, “Suck It,” in reference to WWE was heard as often as “touchdown”).

It was during these years that we started following the teams of our friends and our parents. I became a Steelers fan, and on Sundays, I hated my best friend who was a Cowboys fan. This type of tradition of learning the game through backyard tackling evolved for many youth. Many went on to play for their middle schools, their high schools, and a few exceptionally gifted players went on to play in college. However, the backyard football game lived on for the rest of us as our only outlets to showcase our skills as premier players in a game we aren’t even in shape enough to play. Welcome to backyard football evolved.

College is the place to make friends, establish relationships, and build yourself up for a career of your choosing. It is also the place where backyard heroes from years past line up against each other to relive the glory days of being young and being able to tackle the little guy. I am now 21 years old and have been playing football for the past month or so with some friends and anyone else we can get to show up. Our biggest games have been 11 per team, our smallest have been 6. We play with the intensity of a cornered wildcat and the stamina of a person who hasn’t seen the inside of a weight room in years. Yet we show up and leave everything we have on the field. The trash talk is similar, only containing more expletives than nouns. “Them” are still the enemies. And the game is played in roughly the same way as it was from the first time we played back in kindergarten. However, for all of these similarities, there are differences that are as astounding as they are absurd, and they serve to make the college variety of backyard football about as close as we can get to ever making the big time.

First off, we are all huge. That term is relative to our appearances in years past, but for some of us, it is simply the only way we can be described. Amongst everyone I play with, there are three guys who weigh at least 240 pounds. Nearly everyone tips the scales at over 200, but there are a few lightweights who, no disrespect intended, we will never ask to play offensive or defensive line.

Coupled with this increase in weight is the increase in the desire to hit something. College students are generally not angry people, but when a serious game of football is at stake, we become objects of punishment, hurling ourselves at our opponents to take them down as hard as humanly possible without breaking them into tiny pieces. Sometimes this leads to accidents, such as when a kid named James potentially broke a rib, or Jake nearly tore his hamstring, or the countless concussions, stingers, jammed fingers, and twisted ankles we encounter nearly every game. Nobody said this was a child’s game, and we certainly don’t play like it is.

Now, while the physicality of the game was something that was obviously going to change over time, the level of the game we play was something I did not see changing. Back in the day, a usual play entailed a quarterback saying “go,” everyone running around somewhere, someone yelling “blitz” and rushing the quarterback, and the quarterback running about half the field. Going into our variety of backyard football, that’s the kind of game I expected to encounter. I was way off.

Thanks to the evolution of video games, all day sports channels, and countless discussions, everyone actually knew how to play the game correctly, or about as correctly as we can play without referees. Now it’s stunts and cover 2s, safety blitzes and quarterback containment on defense and flanker screens, reverses, quarterback draws, and corner fades on offense. What’s amazing about all of this is that everyone knew what all of these things were. Mind you, just because we knew what they were does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean these plays were run well, if at all, when they were called. But, with surprising regularity, they were executed.

It’s this evolution, the change from running around aimlessly to running designed plays that is the best part of our brand of football. There is nothing more enjoyable now than laying down an amazing block on a blitz, or taking the hit as the ball is pitched on the option play. We now can truly say we play the game of football the way we imagined ourselves playing, in school yards and parks, so many years ago.