As Fall just begins to set in this year, the cooler air and the smell of turning leaves causes me to be even more nostalgic than usual (if you can believe that), and with football on the brain, I started thinking back about all of my favorite football toys. So, let's get started with my top 5 favorite football toys of my youth.
And here goes the kickoff...
1. Nerf FootballYou just weren't properly living life as a kid if you didn't have a Nerf football. I had a few over the years, but my favorite one was an all brown one with white pad-print over the "laces" that was actually a Nerf knock-off. The best thing about these were that if you were as bad as a wide receiver as I was, they didn't hurt so bad when you caught them with your face.
2. Electronic Football
I never actually own an electronic football set, which basically allowed you to spend a half hour carefully placing your players on the line of scrimmage and then flicking the on switch which made the little players vibrate into each other. My brother had one, though, and I have fond memories of busting it out once, only once, on a cold November afternoon and having a blast playing it. I wish we would have played it more.
I've written extensively on my fond memories of the Schaper Super Toe set, so I won't too into it here. But just the fact that this one toy keeps popping up in my posts should tell you how awesome it was.
Again, this was one of those things owned by my brother, but I remember getting my grubby little mitts on it several times and playing it for hours. It's amazing how some flashing lights and few bleeps and boops could keep us mesmerized back in the day.
This. Game. Was. King. It is scientifically impossible to have more fun with a single sheet of notebook paper. I learned how to play paper football in 2nd grade, but it wasn't until 3rd grade that we got crazy into it. I would gain a modicum of cool points one Fall day in school when I made our school's very first paper football out of brown construction paper with stripes and laces painted on with White-Out. I would eventually take several sheets of green construction paper, some tape and some white chalk and make and entire field that covered two desks face-to-face, that we would fold up and store when we were done, only to unfurl once again the time time too much rain or snow kept our recesses inside. One of my best friends made a pair of goal posts out of some taped-together pencils and our little lunch-time/recess gang was the paper football hub every football season.
Just writing about it makes me want to play right now. I think I have some brown and green construction paper around here somewhere.
That's it for this week's Top 5 list! Tune in next week for another episode!
