5 Ways to Incorporate Football Season into your Classroom Instruction

5 Ways to incorporate Football Season in your instruction

By Jason Patrick Klein

Ok, so I don’t often get the chance to write for the blog, but something Erin mentioned
the other day about one of her students brought me back to my childhood. One of her

boys in class, while giving an answer that would be 33, instead stated “Kris Draper’s
number”. For those of you who don’t know, Kris Draper is a recently retired Detroit Red
Wing hockey player, who wore the number 33 on his back for nearly 20 twenty seasons
in the Motor City. This was indeed the correct answer, even while a bit of an indirect
path to the number 33.

As a child, this is exactly the way that I remembered numbers and many other things
as well. I remember bringing up examples of things that I thought were awesome
connections, and of course my teacher would look at me as if I were insane.

Teacher: “Let’s just give the answer Jason, nobody even knows what you mean.”

Me: “WHAT DO YOU MEAN NOBODY KNOWS? THERE WERE 100,000
PEOPLE AT THAT FOOTBALL GAME!!!! HOW MANY PEOPLE WERE AT THE
SCIENCE FAIR????”

But in reality, a lot of people did not make the connections, as they did not have sports in
their lives regularly. I for one, lived for sports. I knew every statistic. Batting averages,
win-loss records, most touchdowns, yards, wins, anything from about 1975-1995, you
name it, I knew it. Still do. While these statistics were a bit annoying for my teachers
to listen to a seven year old just rattle off, it now seems like a missed opportunity in
hindsight. If they had paid attention, they’d have realized I was doing long division
and fractions before they had taught it, what a fantastic resource. And there are a lot of
kids that love sports, so it is a great tool to use in the classroom. For those of you who
will counter with the argument that not all kids love sports, I ask, how many kids love
boarding a train in Newark on a Tuesday and arriving in Omaha on a Friday…..see,
already lost ya.

1. Quarters
a. Football games have quarters. They are 15 minutes each. The entire
game is one hour. Any idea how I figured out what a quarter hour was?
b. The quarters are appropriately named the First, Second, Third, and Fourth
Quarter, respectively. They are also divided by Halftime, which comes
between the Second and Third Quarter. Collectively, the First and Second
Quarter are called the First Half. You can figure out the rest.

2. Yards Per Carry
a. Very Cool Statistic for running backs. Say I run the ball 10 times, for
80 yards, I have averaged 8 yards per carry. Technically speaking, this
often appears better to coaches than somebody that runs the ball 18 times
for 100 yards, as they are averaging 5.5 yards per carry. As a coach, you
want more yards on each carry. I knew how to compute this basic division
problem when I was in second grade. You can use this same statistic for
catches, passes, kick returns, or any other yardage statistic!


3. The Clock
a. Often at the end of a game, the defense needs to get the ball back, and
the offense tries to stall and run the clock out. It is common practice for
fans to attempt to determine how many :35 second play clocks are still
available in the game clock. This is tricky, and likely better suited for our
older kids out there, but Kleinspiration has a variety of readers, so here
goes….

i.  If there are 3:00 left in the game, that means that the offense has 5
play clocks before they will run out the clock. They legally have
to run a play every 35 seconds. So they will need to earn a first
down or give the ball back at some point soon.
ii.  If the offense is at 1:45 or under, and their opponent has no
timeouts, it is smooth sailing, the game is over. They can run the
clock out, because they will run the clock exactly the :35 allowable
3 times and use the full 1:45. Complicated, but fun, and there are
plenty of other clock games.

4. Winning Percentage
a. It’s all about winning in sports. Winning percentage is a simple
formula: wins/games played. This is more commonly used in baseball,
however it is being used a lot more in football recently, especially with
multidivisional playoffs, and is very simple to compute. This percentage
is stated with 3 decimal points (unlike anything else in life), so if a team is
winning 50% of their games, they are at .500.

5. A Yard
a. Nowhere else in everyday life have I ever, even now as an adult, ever,
seen the use of a YARD as a unit of measure. Except football. Football
has these pure, plain, beautiful white chalk hash marks every three feet.
They are a yard apart. Exactly one yard. There are 100 of them on a
field. Track uses meters. Baseball feet. Builders use square inches.
Truck drivers use cubic inches, regular drivers use the mile. Zoning
commissions use the acre. Nobody uses the yard. Nobody, except
teachers, and football players.