The Jays Scoreboard.

The Jays Scoreboard. This may be along the lines of the Mom's meeting, but I thought I might throw it out there for those moms (and others) that might be interested and if you are not you can politely smile as if I were going over plays in the playbook with you.

I know it would be nicer to have a winning scoreboard to work from, but this just explains the Jay scoreboard a bit for those that may not know. Some may have different layouts, and some may simply show the clock and the score, but hopefully this will give you some insight on what you might be looking at.

The first box is for the home teams score. In this case the Jays. The little football inside the red circle is lit up when the Jays have possession of the ball. In other words when they are on offense. The blue circle shows where the home team's score is displayed. The green circle indicates how many timeouts a team has left (Time Outs Left - T.O.L).

Additional note: The jersey worn by the home team in football is just the reverse of what it typically is for basketball. The Home Football Team normally wears the dark jersey in football.

The next box shows how much time is left in the period, sometimes referred to as a quarter. This displays in minutes and second until it drops below one minute and then displays seconds and tenths of a second.

The information here is simply the same as what was in the first box for the home team, yet for the visiting team. I would guess it is simply displayed in reverse to give the scoreboard a more symmetrical look.

The red circle indicates how many timeouts the visiting team has left (Time Outs Left - T.O.L). The blue circle shows where the home team's score is displayed. The little football inside the green circle is lit up when the visiting team has possession of the ball.

Displays the current period, of which there are normally 4 (some of the younger teams have more periods, but they are usually shorter periods). After the first two periods it is typically halftime.

This box simply tells you what yard line the ball is on. The middle of the field is marked as 50 and goes down from there in each direction, thus the goal line would end up at 0 going in either direction (just don't call it the zero yard line or people will know you don't know what you are talking about).

In yellow you see the speaker which makes the siren noise when a period is over. This box displays the down.

Simplistically put, each team gets four chances to make a first down. If they do not make a first down within the four chances they turn the ball over to the other team. This can simply be turned over at the spot on the field where the ball was when the other team failed to make a first down, or a team may choose to punt it on fourth down, thus turning the ball over to the other team in a less desirable position (from the perspective of the opposing team) on the field.

I don't believe this is always used, but when used it will let you know how many yards a team has to go to make a first down. On first down this will normally show 10. As a team may loose yardage for many reasons, such as a quarterback getting sacked, a penalty, etc., this number can be more than 10 and as they make progress the number will go down (when the ball is marked, not as they are running).

And that is a quick explanation of the Jays scoreboard from someone that is not very knowledgeable about the sport of football. Feel free to add comments if there is something you would like to point out.