Paper Football

(Photo Courtesy: https://www.scholastic.com/parents/school-success/learning-toolkit-blog/super-bowl-science-explore-physics-paper-footballs.html)

The mild mannered and simplicity of the improve game, Paper Football.  Elsewhere, this may fall under the covert title of Flick Football.  No game board is necessary.  No card deck.  No dice.  All that is needed is a simple sheet of paper!  See https://newtonma.myrec.com/documents/paper_football_game.pdf for an idea of how to create and quite possibly play the game properly.

This game captivated my fellow classmates during our middle and high school days.  During the study hall sessions, instead of opting to catch up on our homework or utilize the time far more wisely by studying for the morrow's quiz or test, entertainment was a foot!  Variations are widely available via the internet and we would challenge ourselves to create smaller triangular footballs.  The smallest of which was approximately a half inch triangle.  Normally, a normal full-rule sheet of paper was utilized as we folded it in half, lengthwise, then began the triangular fold.  There was a "king-size" version which was made wherein we had folded the first triangle fold across the full sheet of paper.  While a very thin and nimble football, it equally was a bigger challenge to obtain an agreeable "pass" by the teacher (caused too much turning heads attention).

There were no fancy accouterments of straw or crafted field goal posts or even drawn lines.  Rather, our touchdown goal line was a pen cap measured two standard football lengths (normal paper football sized) away from the end of the table.  Scoring was much like the National Football League's.  In our version , we merely slid the football with a couple of fingers towards the our opponent's side.  If we were short, it was the opponent's turn.  If we got a goal, we had a change to obtain an extra point via the field goal flick.  The opponent would create finger "L"s, touching their thumbs together, while the "kicker" would place their football vertically on the table, using one hand's index finger to hold the ball and with the other hand, they would flick the football towards the goal.

An additional play rule was that if the one opponent had not scored after four consecutive turns, they would have the chance to forfeit or perform a field goal to gain an additional three points.

The game was challenging to play.  Not the game itself, but as we attended a small, private school, our grades were normally combined or one teacher hosted the history class while the other portion of students needed to be placed somewhere as a study hall.  The challenge was to be quiet and not distracting to our fellow eight to ten active students.  Chuckling, excitement, and a little zealousness surfaced and we would be given the "settle down," "quiet," or the eventual threat of loosing this "privilege" altogether.

For our founder Jason Gross and I, we would create a new paper football for every nearly game and would attempt to hide the evidence...while not at all necessary to do so.  We placed them into a small, school-sized tissue box and for quite a few years, I toted that within my memorabilia box.

Did you play paper or flick football?  How did you play it?

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