American Football
A shutout in American football is fairly uncommon. Keeping an opponent scoreless in American Football requires a team's defense to be able to consistently shut down both pass and run offenses over the course of a game. The difficulty of completing a shutout is compounded by the many ways a team can score in the game. For example, teams can attempt field goals, which have a high rate of success. The range of NFL caliber kickers makes it possible for a team with a weak offense to get close enough (within 50 yards) to the goalposts and kick a field goal. In the decade of the 2000s there were 79 shutouts in 1,168 regular-season games, for an average of only one shutout for every 15 games.
Shelbyville Tennessee's Bedford County Training School Fighting Tigers recorded 52 consecutive shutouts from 1942 to 1949, a record for an American high school football team. The second-longest streak is 18.
Read more about this topic: Shutout
Famous quotes containing the words american and/or football:
“In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.”
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)