Sorting out a season’s worth of memories
There certainly is a lot to digest when one has gorged himself on 3,348 downs of Kraft Family IFL pigskin over the past four months.
Between the 5,231 passing yards to go along with an astoundingly parallel 5,129 yards on the ground (not to mention the 3,084 tackles and at least triple that amount of missed tackles) it’s easy to get caught up in the mind-boggling compilation of numbers. (Quick: How many total touchdowns do you estimate were scored this year? Answer below)
However, the story of the 2009/10 season of Israeli tackle football goes well beyond the array of statistics that I can throw at you. The speed, the power, the intensity, the extreme competition were all ever-present as always, but even more than that was the continued explosion of the sport from one corner of the country to the other as the grassroots momentum continued to build and a swell of new local talent began to emerge.
That, and the collection of wonderfully eclectic personalities throughout the league, are what will remain vivid in my mind well after a most hard-fought 35 games. Read more
Kings snag second seed, playoff bye
Big Blue drops third in a row to slide into third; Pioneers seal Black Swarm’s fate
Thirty-five games down, six left to go...and if the previous four months were any indication, we are in for a hell of a ride in the playoffs.
The curtains closed on the Kraft Family IFL regular season with a pair of nail-biting contests that had vastly different implications. In the weekend opener from the capital, the Papagaio Jerusalem Kings jumped out to a 10-0 lead and withstood some fourth-quarter Aryeh Bauman heroics to pull it out 18-12 and snatch second place from their city brethren at the time that matters most.
On Saturday night in the South, the host Beersheva Black Swarm became the first team in league history to record a winless season, falling to 0-10 to wrap up their inaugural campaign with a courageous 20-14 defeat at the hands of the Dancing Camel Modi’in Pioneers.
While the Black Swarm opened the scoring with the only TD of the first frame to give the energetic home crowd reason to believe that their boys would finally crack the victory column, ultimately Beersheva couldn’t overcome a pair of Tal Brown interceptions and a couple of Yotam Kushnir touchdowns, the second of which stuck the hosts in a two-score hole that proved just a bit too deep to dig out of. Read more