Why I Love the Sport of Football – An A7FL Debut Column By Matt Ryan

A7FL Pays Homage to Football’s Past, Defines its Future 

Column by Matt Ryan

Editor’s Note: Matt Ryan is a sports multi-hyphenate whose interests span MMA, pro wrestling, football (he commentates for the A7FL) and beyond. We’re pleased to provide him with an open forum to provide his take on American 7s football. @MryanConsulting on Twitter and JesuisMattRyan on Instagram.

I love the sport of football.

From the time I could remember, I loved watching the game and learning its history. For me, there were very few things more interesting than the development of what is now our nation’s biggest sport.

Growing up in my part of Brooklyn and being the son of a single mother, pee-wee football wasn’t an option, so instead my friends and I would play football, but not at the park… mainly cause the park didn’t have a grass field, but we’d play on the sidewalk and streets of the block we grew up on. Trying to “Moss” one another or emulate Jeremy Shockey, Ed Reed, or Brian Dawkins, who were GODS to us in the early 2000, or the Christian McCaffrey, Gronk and JJ Watt for you fellow young people.

That’s why I love the A7FL.

The A7FL reminds me of the football I loved as a kid and still love as a very childish adult. It’s about energy, the big play, the outlandish characters, jersey names, and it’s about the love of the game.

It feels like the Street video game series, where you and your friends get together to play other people and prove you’re the best team on the block, the best team in the town, the best team in the state. And going back to the birth of American 7s Football, that’s what it was all about.

Now that the A7FL plays in multiple states, with multiple divisions, that rallying cry is still there: “Our town is better than your town.”

And when you get down to the root of everything in sports, it’s about proving our chunk of land is the best, and we will do anything and say anything to prove it.  Whether Patterson, Orlando, Baltimore, San Diego, or the 600 block of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, we want to represent and not only the best of where we came from but the best there is. Period..

Also the throw off…

Anyone who played ball in the streets as a kid knows that the only way you were going to get anything resembling a special teams play was with your arm and not your leg. In the A7FL it’s less about breaking car windows or embarrassing yourself with your inability to kick a sphere more than ten feet, it’s about keeping the action going while at the same time creating a safer game.

The return touchdown in the A7FL is magic. As an announcer, it’s some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my career. Being able to see someone speed out like a bullet and cut through tacklers with reckless abandon, being able to see them spot that open hole and turn into Usain Bolt in just those few seconds gives me memories of Deangelo Hall turning loose.

When I watch the A7FL, I see dudes from all walks of life and all levels of experience doing their best to win the game and win the championship. On Monday, they go back to their jobs, they go back to their families, they go back to being the guy who goes to the grocery store in-between their kid’s ballet and karate classes. But when they’re on that field and they have tens if not hundreds of thousands of people tuning in to watch them, they’ve become the stars they always looked up to.

They get people like Snoop Dogg, Deion Sanders, and other football legends watching them play, and treating THEM like the stars.

Because they are.

They are the guys they wanted to be growing up, they’re the ones they played in the video games, they get to do what Doug Reemer and Coop Cooper did in the film Baseketball (You don’t know Baseketball? What is wrong with you people???). They were able to become sports stars with their own game. How can you not love that?

For A7FL guys like Mo Ramadan, Corey Hammond, and Kareem Moon, they get to be themselves on that field, they get to have what THEY want on their jerseys, and they get to play the game they love one more time.

Sitting on my couch or seeing the league’s highlights makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up because these guys are GOOD, the games are GOOD, the football is GOOD, and these guys are making the game I love into something GREAT.

It’s the renegade game we grew up loving and wanting to play, it’s what the original XFL could have been, and that’s only scratching the surface. The bigger this league gets, the more athletes see this as their way to reclaim glory, who knows what can happen next?

Imagine someone like a Tim Tebow, Geno Smith, or another athlete who had their NFL dream dashed, and then seeing them  A7FL’s wide-open style of play. What if the next Robert Saleh is watching this and looking at this game and how to make it better, or the next Eric Bieniemy, or the next Bill Belicheck seeing this game and imagining the possibilities?

If you are that next Saleh, Bieniemy, or even the next Jerry Jones, you can walk right into the league, create a team and try to prove the way YOU want to present pro football is the best way.  You know how many Madden seasons I’ve played trying to build a team up to a championship, the hours many like me agonize over drafting computer-generated players or are looking to meticulously create the incoming draft class so they can have a more realistic experience to prove that how they think about football is a right way of thinking about football?

The A7FL is a laboratory for the future of football, whether it’s their innovative approach to concussions, CTE and the overall health of players, or the local-national divisional structure that brings a European style to this most American sport (and breeds natural local rivalries that harken back to the league’s founding ethos), or having cameras on the field (right in the huddle!) during play. Or even allowing goofs like me to call the games and present these guys for who they really are: star athletes.

That’s why I watch, that’s why I work here, that’s why I love football.