Football Leads the Way to A New Standard of Measurement

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Americans are used to thinking of themselves as the most advanced and powerful society in the world, a natural leader, but recent events have eroded this image a bit. The “Coalition of the Willing”, the 2003 alliance to fight the Cheney/Bush war in Iraq, shrank from 47 original members to 30, leaving the US allied with such world powerhouses as Palau, Albania, Micronesia and Uganda. The coalition to attack the Islamic State also features stellar military juggernauts like Belgium, the Netherlands and Estonia. But there is another area where the US is in even more distinguished company: the World Alliance of Countries Avoiding Metric Opting for Lengths English (WACAMOLE), or the “Axis of Inches”.

football_field_dimensions

There are three members of the Axis of Inches: the United States, Liberia and Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). Despite the fact that the US Congress officially adopted the metric system in 1866, unless you make cigarettes, liquor or soda, millimeters and milliliters are probably not part of your daily life and zero degrees is way colder than the freezing point.

If you are an American, you probably consider the foot, the mile and the acre as the primary units of distance and area, but you would be dead wrong. In the United States, the standard unit is the football field. Think about it: nearly every time you see a documentary on TV, you hear statements like “…laid on its side, the [Sears Tower/Statue of Liberty/giant ball of string/politician’s ego] would be X football fields long.” Or “…the hangar where the new superplane is being built would cover ten football fields”.

There are some advantages to this, the foremost being that the number of Americans who don’t know what a football field looks like probably wouldn’t outnumber the population of Palau. It’s a handy size, one that most people can relate to. Its area is probably similar to the size of many city blocks, so it’s something that a vast majority of the population can visualize easily.

However, on further consideration, the disadvantages are many and manifest. For one thing, most people are used to seeing a football field on a TV screen, and have no real concept of its actual size. For another, there would have to be an agreement on which standard for field size to use (NFL, NCAA or high school) to define the Standard Field and whether or not to include the sidelines as part of the overall dimensions. We could, of course, designate a single stadium as a national standard, but if the NFL got involved, they might insist that the standard be based on the Super Bowl , which means that next year’s replacement parts won’t fit this year’s car. The NFL’s tendency to sell sponsorship for literally everything (“…this instant replay brought to you by Waste Management Recycling…” “…this penalty call is sponsored by Corrections Corporation of America…” “…this quarterback butt-slap comes to you courtesy of the Stonewall Bar…”) could lead to signs like, “This field brought to you by Ralph’s Body Shop.” every 300 feet.

Another problem lies in deciding on fractions of the Standard Field. We could start by dividing it in half, calling the measure a “hemifield”. Cut that in half again and you get a “hemisemifield”. Repeat, and you get a “hemisemidemifield”. By the time you get down to the inch level, though, it would probably take a whole page just to write the unit’s name. Going the other way, it’s not as cumbersome, but the numbers get a little unwieldy. The distance between Washington DC and New York, for instance, is 3,590 fields (car odometers would have to have considerably more than five digits). The average distance from the earth to the moon is about 436,480,000 fields. We could, I suppose, use terms like “kilofield” and “megafield”, but those are probably too metric-sounding for most ‘Mericans.

Finally, we’d have to come up with a system for measuring volume and weight. Perhaps we could use the capacity of one of those Gatorade coolers that get dumped on winning coaches, and the weight of the liquid in the container when full as standards. The next big step is getting the rest of the world (including recalcitrant Liberia and Myanmar) to fall into place.

One thing’s for sure – by switching to the field system of measurement, we’d know how long it would take the NFL’s star running back to reach the moon on foot.

About Post Author

E.A. Blair

E.A. Blair is the 'nom de commenter' of someone who has been a teacher, game designer, programmer, logistic support officer and technical writer at various times in his life. Most of the hits in a search on his real name predate the internet; it appears exactly four times in Wikipedia and six times on IMDb.
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Bill Formby
9 years ago

Good Post. Like, you know man, we “mericans are supposed to be setting the standards for the world. Like I could never learn the tens system. I mean, I know Bolt is the fast man in the hundred meter race but that don’t make him the fastest man in a hundred yards. 🙂 🙂

Stormin' Norm
9 years ago

420,384 football fields to the moon given 100 yards for the field length and 384,000 km to the moon.

What? Me? What do you mean ‘you Googled it’???? How dare you!!! 😉

Jerry G.
9 years ago

A fascinating and intriguing thought indeed. I am wondering just how long it would take to reach the moon on foot.

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