Football?

Good question.?ÿ I guess it has something to do with attempting to provide the average couch potato with an area with which he or she might collectively compare.?ÿ I've even heard volumes being described as a certain number of Olympic size swimming pools.

I personally discard the end zones (1.1 acre vs. 1.32 acre) if asked to provide an area measurement in football fields.?ÿ Perhaps someone here might have more insight on this.?ÿ Down here in the south end of the prairie most football fields around here have variable sized end zones, but are usually 100 yds. in length....more or less.

I would also like to take this opportunity to give a shout out to a few of my favorite obscure measurements like the smoot, the barley corn and the magnificent hogshead.

Per this site, they count the end zones resulting in an area of 1.32231405 acres.?ÿ So three football fields would be very close to 4 acres, thus equating to 121 football fields per quarter section in PLSSia.?ÿ Or 484 per standard section.?ÿ Still, not an area I would normally attempt to visualize in order to approximate the number of such areas within a larger area.

https://www.stack.com/a/the-dimensions-of-a-football-field

Note the differences in the distances between hash marks for high school, college and professional fields.

Of course, we could complicate things by considering the size of a football field for 8-man football competition.?ÿ That can be much smaller.?ÿ?ÿ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-man_football

Ah, the Smoot... The namesake of a famous M.I.T. student.

?ÿ

????

"a big orange drink" pronounced in a distinctly Southern manner comes to mind.

@holy-cow

Down here in the South every carbonated sodie pop is referred to as a "coke". Thus when Bubber hollers "let's git us a coke" he means a "cold drink" as in Cool Hand Luke. Nehi, RC, MrCola, Upper 10, etc. ???? 

I always get a kick out of them bringing the chains out to measure to the nearest fraction of an inch from one guessed spot to the other guessed spot where they think the ball last stopped.

I think it's a very American ritual, BS measured to the most highly precise guessification possible.

@dave-karoly

Guesstification. That's a good term. Mind if I use it with the County People?

@skeeter1996

Feel free

Area is too difficult of a concept for many people to understand, but football fields can really help with lengths. For example, the equatorial radius of the earth, according to the GRS80 ellipsoid, is 6,387,137 meters. That's 58,126 and a fraction football fields, counting the end zones.

See how much easier that is to visualize?

@flga-pls-2-2

Go Ducks!

@mathteacher

Right but how many Olympic Swimming Pools is that?

@dave-karoly

I think that an olympic pool is 50 meters long. so the equatorial radius would be 127,742 and a fraction olympic pools.

It might be helpful to visualize olympic pools in terms of football fields. It takes almost 2.2 olympic pools to equal the length of one football field, including the end zones.?ÿ

Thanks, Dave. Everything is so much clearer now.

Posted by: @flga-pls-2-2

That's pretty much my opinion of American football.

But then I don't root for any athletic team of any kind unless one of the players knows me.?ÿ I can't see getting excited about one team or another based on them being recruited for a particular college or certain city.