Just a touch different
Fall means football. And football means hard hits, field goals and coaches covered in Gatorade.
Well, that’s football for some. For intramural players at USU, it means pulling flags, going for two and earning a good sportsmanship rating.
There are two such leagues at USU. One plays during the day on the HPER field and the other in the evenings at Romney Stadium.
Rob Smith, sophomore, plays in the night league with OJ’s Boys, a team made up of his friends. The team decided on their name after Smith’s teammate Josh Brown had a dream.
“Brown had a dream the night before he had to turn in the paper that we were called OJ’s boys. It has nothing to do with OJ Simpson like most people think,” Smith said.
Joining Smith and Brown on the team is sophomore Mark Saltern.
“My buddy asked me to play and I love to play. It’s a blast,” Saltern said.
Instead of tackles, players are downed when their belt with hanging flags is pulled from around their waist.
“This is a completely different style of play,” Saltern said. “Sometimes I would like to lay someone out when they are coming across the middle and it’s a high pass, but I don’t. My instincts tell me that I should.”
Smith said, “I’d like to play tackle but I just don’t think my body would allow me to play, so I have to stick with flag football. I’m getting a little bit too old for the tackle.”
Another difference in the play style is the extra points. After a touchdown, the team can choose to go for one point on one offensive down from the 3-yard line or try for two from deeper or three from even farther.
There are also only seven players on the field at once, as opposed to the usual 11 in football.
The leagues are currently in the single-elimination playoff. All teams receive a sportsmanship rating for each game and every team with better than a C average in sportsmanship gets to play in the playoffs.
Smith said, “The best moment was when we found out that we still had a 3.0 on the sportsmanship so we could actually play in the playoffs. Our team struggled with that a bit.”
The teams, which started play in September, played four games each before the playoff, and when the winner is crowned on Oct. 27, Saltern hopes to be there.
“That would just be sweet,” he said. “I couldn’t say that it would be the best day of my life, but it would be close.”
-benwalker@cc.usu.edu