Football
Football is the most popular sport in Pennsylvania, especially in the Lehigh Valley, Northeastern Pennsylvania, Central Pennsylvania, and Western Pennsylvania. In fact, Western Pennsylvania is the home to some of the earliest moments in football history, as the first professional football game was played in Pittsburgh in 1895, with the first-ever professional player (William "Pudge" Heffelfinger) playing a game in the city just three years earlier.
Today, football is popular on all levels, from high school, college, and professionally. The high school games get regular attention in the local newspapers and regularly draw over 10,000 fans to the games. At the college level, three Pennsylvania universities compete at the highest level: the Penn State Nittany Lions (of State College), the Pitt Panthers (of Pittsburgh), and the Temple Owls (of Philadelphia). The Penn State-Pitt rivalry, was once one of the biggest rivalries in the college game until a scheduling dispute ended the rivalry in 2000. The Army–Navy Game has also been played in Philadelphia on a regular basis, with their games only occasionally played on other sites, such as the 2007 matchup being played in Baltimore.
Professionally, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL are also hugely popular. Both teams have fan bases across the entire state, and in the case of the Steelers, are one of the most popular sports teams in the United States, if not the world. (This is likely due to that team's dominance in the NFL during the 1970s.) While the Eagles are not quite as popular as the Steelers outside Pennsylvania (as well as nearby states to Philadelphia such as New Jersey and Delaware), they still maintain a passionate fan base in the state and across the United States as they are one of the more popular teams in the NFL. Often one of the most rowdy in the NFL, the Eagles fanbase is known for their passion and dedication. In fact, the Eagles' old home field, Veterans Stadium, was the first sports stadium in the United States to have a jail cell as a result of the rowdiness of the fans, but was removed only a couple years later after incidents settled down. Both fanbases though are considered to be among the best traveled fanbases in the NFL. During games in which the teams are on the road, Steelers fans and Eagles fans alike migrate to the opposing team's stadium and always have a strong presence, and in some cases, their numbers have made opposing teams feel as if they are not in their home stadium—a testament to the die-hard fanbases of professional football in Pennsylvania.
Pittsburgh was also the home to one of the first Arena Football League franchises, the Pittsburgh Gladiators, in 1987. Although the team moved to Tampa, Florida in 1991 (where they currently exist as the Tampa Bay Storm), arena football remains in the state, with the Philadelphia Soul and the Pittsburgh Power playing in the main AFL while the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Pioneers play in the AFL's minor league af2.
Read more about this topic: Sports In Pennsylvania
Famous quotes containing the word football:
“You can’t be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1993)
“... in the minds of search committees there is the lingering question: Can she manage the football coach?”
—Donna E. Shalala (b. 1941)
“...I’m not money hungry.... People who are rich want to be richer, but what’s the difference? You can’t take it with you. The toys get different, that’s all. The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football. It’s all relative.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)