Australian Rules Football Is The Greatest Sport On The Planet foot ball

Once upon a time, ESPN was one of 38 channels or so competing for your eyes on basic cable. Competing may be too strong of a word for what they were doing: they had the rights to nothing original, did Sportscenter on a set obviously made of model train foam and hot glue, and were forced to air anything they could afford. This is why you may have dim memories of Aussie Rules Football. You need to freshen up those memories, and you need to do it now.
The heroic sport of brawny men in hot pants gleefully defacing a cricket pitch in the world's most frenetic field goal kicking contest has come back home to ESPN, the network that originally brought the sport to the United States' broadcast spectrum in the 1980s. This reunion comes not a minute too soon: your sports diet is devoid of vitamin V, where the V stands for sweet sporting violence.
THE RULES
You're not coming here for the rules. In fact, let's just outsource that and say that Dave Warner does a much better job of covering all that in this concise, brilliantly put together intro to the game's basic rules. When I fell in love with the sport, I managed to intuit the following about the sport, and it is all I have ever really needed to know about Aussie Rules Football.

about 1 month ago:FREMANTLE, AUSTRALIA - MARCH 12: Jay Van Berlo of the Dockers tackles Ashton Hams of the Eagles during the NAB Challenge AFL match between the Fremantle Dockers and the West Coast Eagles at Fremantle Oval on March 12, 2011 in Fremantle, Australia. (Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)

• No pads. They're unseemly, unmanly, and interfere with the ladies seeing the full musculature of your shoulders.
• The best way to display this musculature, apparently, is to throw said muscles at 20 miles an hour into the ribs of a player on the other team.
• The game is played on a cricket pitch. This is the game's greatest joke, since it's not like there are five players on a side or something. No, there are 18 players on either side, meaning the equivalent of a full platoon of well-conditioned soldiers chewing up the pitch like polo horses at once. Groundskeepers who were evil dictators in former lives are assigned to clean up the fescue wreckage left behind. Don't weep for them; they deserve it, I'm sure.
• You won't have any clue what's going on, but that's fine. Players have to bounce the ball every ten meters or so. Why they have to do this is a mystery; it may be to demonstrate some element of skill besides just running headlong into each other like rugby players, or it may be a tribute to early Aussie Rules players who had to smash deadly brown snakes and redback spiders crawling on their fields.
• Actually, I'm certain it was to smash spiders and snakes, and still is.
• Players can move the ball by running, punching the ball forward, or kicking it. You'll have no clue why they're doing this at any point, leading you to believe that Aussie Rules is really just a cover for random violence, astonishing displays of kicking accuracy, and bizarre running volleyball sets. If you have a problem with this confusion, you probably shouldn't watch Aussie Rules football. The Masters is coming on soon! You'll probably like that, especially your good friend Jim Nantz, whose head would explode from the fun overdose that is footy. 
• Memo to self: get Jim Nantz to a footy game immediately.
• Points are scored when teams kick the ball through the massive field goal posts. You'll notice there are two sets of poles. Kick it cleanly through the ones in the middle, and you've got six points. Miss and make it through the smaller outer set, and you're awarded one point (presumably out of pity for your pisspoor accuracy.)
• The game is high-scoring, moves constantly, and has no offside rule. Go wherever you want, tackle between the shoulders and knees, and when you don't prepare to be annihilated by some dude who grew up tossing sheep and eating nails for fun in a desolate outback station. You might get a penalty, too, but what you really need to worry about are the 17 other dudes on the team planning vengeance for whatever heinous thing you just did.

Tweet