the first super bowl: 6 fun trivia facts

The Chief's' Willie Mitchell tackles the Packers' Carroll Dale.

The first Super Bowls was held January 15, 1967, pitting the Green Bay Packers of the NFL and the Kansas City Chiefs of the AFL. The two competing leagues had just merged, so there was even more animosity tied to the game than usual. The Green Bay Packers from the more established NFL won, as expected, 35-10.

To football fanatics the basic facts stated above are common knowledge. But here are six fun trivia facts you might not know.

1. The first Super Bowl actually wasn't called the Super Bowl. It was first touted as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game.  The game was such a big hit by the second year that it was felt the

10 signs football is upon us

10. every morning at 6:30 your house's windows shudder and shake unevenly from the percussion section of local high school marching band practice - six miles away.

9. coverage of the US presidential election and European bailouts drop to pages four and five respectively when the USA Today NFL preview edition hits newsstands.

8. ESPN begins advertising the two-hour pre preseason special guide to new fall beer commercials.

7. a stack of decade-old-plus t-shirts your spouse, girlfriend or mom has been asking you to get rid of is carefully boxed and carried to the crawl space - and replaced by a box of decade-old-plus sweatshirts your spouse, girlfriend or mom had been asking you to get rid of that was carefully stored in the crawl space.

6. you are momentarily overcome by a light-headed giddy sense of euphoria that you won't have to watch any more baseball games to get a sports fix until the World Series is played sometime during football season in what appears to be blizzard conditions.

5. colleges and universities allow young people that are are into extracurricular activities like "pursuing a degree"and "hitting the library"back on campus in time for the first football game of the year.

4. you realize you know the first and middle names of every member of the offensive line of your alma mater even if you can't get first names of your own kids right every time.

3. ignoring pain from bunions and planter fasciitis you have your youngest child hold a football vertically on the ground so you can see if you can still kick a game-winning field goal as measured by the back of your garage roof.

2. you call your niece - at her father's and fiance's request - to see if you can talk her out of that Saturday afternoon wedding in the fall she is considering.

1. as you stretch out the inflamed rotator cuff and extend the half-locked knee joint, you think back fondly on all your old football injuries - even if you never played the sport.

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Mark Gilroy is author of the critically acclaimed novel Cuts Like a Knife. His second novel, Every Breath You Take, releases on October 23, 2012. A 30-year veteran of the publishing industry, he has served as publisher and executive vice president at several companies and currently runs a company that services retailers, publishers, ministries, and other organizations in the industry.

top 10 ways to know that football is here

Are you ready for some football? Here are the top 10 ways to know it has officially arrived!

1. the bass drum corps from the high school - located more than a couple miles from your house - rattles your windows every morning during marching band practice - and then breaks crystal and knocks picture frames off the wall every other Friday night at home games;

2. you find out where your neighbors moved from or went to college as flags are attached to car windows or hung from front porches (or both) every Saturday morning - of note: you will know when their favorite team has lost a big game when the flag comes down immediately after the game;

3. no more curling tournaments; no more bocci specials; no more cricket highlights from the New Zealand versus Barbados match are shown on ESPN 2 through 25;

4. coaches at every level of football stand before a row of microphones and talk about how tough their opening game against a team that hasn't won a game in three years is going to be...with a straight face;

5. grown men who shouldn't take off their shirts in public take of their shirts in public with a big block letter painted on their chest;

6. television ratings for major league baseball plummet - and no one outside New York City and Boston and whoever lives in one of the cities that has a shot of playing them cares;

7. even the most long suffering of fans - i.e. Cincinnati Bengals fans (the team I grew up watching) - believe this year is going to finally be different for their team (until after the first game is a blowout loss);

8. the skinny kid who majors (or plans to major) in atomic and molecular astrophysics puts on a Tiger outfit and becomes a rock star to the home fans;

9. fantasy draft parties are held in corporate meeting rooms after work hours with a group of eleven people who bring enough pages of notes to fill War and Peace - and a twelfth person who plans to draft the kicker from his alma mater in the first round;

10. fans who have never played a down of football get into heated - and well reasoned - arguments over the merits of cover two versus bump and run; three-four versus four-three; i-formation versus the spread; punting or going for it; 60's Packers versus 80's 49ers versus the 21st Century Patriots; and the current head coach versus the coach who got fired from someone else's team last year.

Are you ready for some football?

Dog Days of Summer: I Lost That Loving Feeling

Yes, the dog days of summer are here. That means basketball, a winter sport indigenous to the U.S., is just starting their championship series. And that hockey, another winter sport, but this one transplanted to frigid regions of the U.S. like Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, and LA, just crowned a new champion. But as the seconds tick off on the NBA Series between the Lakers and the Celtics, what it really means is that we're officially entering the dead period before football season starts.

Some sports purists just sat up a little straighter. Say what? Don't you know it's baseball season!

True. Baseball is still America's pastime, particularly if you live in Boston or NYC and can outspend the rest of the league (combined) in the quest for tactical superiority and garnering every spot on the All Star team. But football is America's passion. And so for the rest of us, excluding St. Louis fans who support their Cards no matter what, Chicago some years (or for certain proud masochistic Cubs fans, every year), and one Cinderella-story elsewhere in America, we just don't care. Sure, we'll watch a game or two before the season is over, but the second game depends on whether women's bowling or billiards (or some combination of those two sports) is in reruns yet.

Just for context, I didn't grow up with anything but love for baseball. I was born in Dayton, Ohio, about 45 miles north of Cincinnati, and was there when the Big Red Machine terrorized opposing pitchers. (My rookie year as a 5-year-old fan at old Crosley Field was Pete Rose's rookie year as a player.) I was in Kansas City for most of the George Brett era and attended a minimum of 20-something games a year.

But something happened. It's not just that the clubs I like started losing. You expect success to be cyclical in sports, unless you're a Cubs fan, of course. (Sorry for that second gratuitous shot at the Cubbies in one article.) With the explosion of free agency, I discovered I didn't know half the guys on "my team" from one season to the next. I could have lived with some rebuilding years with a young exciting roster of "our guys", but once-proud franchises like the Royals and Reds became development squads for the deep pocketed coastal teams. Throw in a couple of strikes, including one that accomplished something that not even Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany could pull off -- shutting down a World Series -- and I was gone as a fan. I think forever.

So you're pretty mad at baseball? You probably think I'm a hater. Nope. The problem is not that I got mad at baseball but that I simply stopped caring a decade ago. And despite publicity gimmicks like the Red Sox winning the World Series and biannual Congressional Steroids hearings, I've lost that loving feeling.

It might be Kevin Garnett with a follow up monster jam or Kobe Bryant with an acrobatic mid-air spin move with a reverse lay up that ends the NBA Finals. But whoever does it sometime in the next 10 days or so, all I can say is it's almost time for football!