The 10 Best Football Films Ever

School is back in session. The dog days of summer are fading and autumn beckons. It is the time of year when football reigns. In the spirit of the season I present to you this countdown of top 10 football films ever!

10 The Longest Yard (1974)

This is the original, not the remake, which pushed "suspension of disbelief" to ludicrous lengths by casting Adam Sandler as a star quarterback. Instead, former Florida State player Burt Reynolds gives an entirely convincing turn as quarterback turned convict Paul Crewe. Former NFL stars Ray Nitschke and Joe Kapp are on hand to lend realism, while a young Bernadette Peters plays the secretary of warden Eddie Albert. The movie builds to the famous guards-vs.-convicts slug fest that makes the typical NFL contest look like a sewing circle.

9 Invincible

The incredible true story of a 30 year old bartender and devoted Philadelphia Eagles fan, Vince Papale, who proved himself at open tryouts in Coach Dick Vermeil's first season, and overcame long odds to play professional football for the Philadelphia Eagles during the 1976, 1977, and 1978 seasons.

8 Necessary Roughness

Texas State University's Fighting Armadillo's must begin their Division I football season with a brand new set of players and coaching staff after the previous coaches and players were banned from playing due to scandal from the previous year. The film is a fun football slapstick version of the baseball film Major League.

7 All the Right Moves

The film that taught an entire generation the fundamentals of defensive-back technique: Play the ball, not the man. A young Tom Cruise, who also appeared in Risky Business and The Outsiders in 1983, believably plays Stef, a high school football player who is desperate to earn a college scholarship as a way out of his dying Pennsylvania steel-belt town. Craig T. Nelson, plays the hard-nosed coach. Lea Thompson is the hometown girlfriend who doubtless inspired many band-camp fantasies. Stef gets kicked off the team at mid-season but still manages to land that elusive full ride thanks to his girlfriend's intercession with the coach's wife.

6 The Express

The moving story of Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy.

5 Wildcats

Another slapstick comedy in the vein of Necessary Roughness but with a little more heart, plus it turned the notion of what a woman's role should be in sports.

4 Any Given Sunday

Perhaps the grittiest football film ever made. Oliver Stone's film took three scripts and merged them together to form a patchwork that showed some of the dark underbelly in the NFL, particularly the sheer physicality of the game. At the heart of the story is Dr. Harvey Mandrake (James Woods) as the team doctor's whose loyalty to the safety of the players is tested against the profits the players bring to the NFL businessman. Mandrake covers for players who are suffering from near-career-ending injuries but helping them dose heavily on on painkillers, steroids, and hormones to cover the pain. It also gave us a taste of how difficult it really is to be an aging franchise quarterback in a sport that keeps getting faster and stronger.

3 The Replacements

Keanu Reeves and Gene Hackman star in this heart touching and wacky film that is based very loosely on the 1987 National Football League strike. A group of replacement players are hired to cross the strike lines and play football games at the highest level during the strike. It was a time when some blue collar guys got the chance of a lifetime to play professional football. Greatest line in the film is uttered by Coach Jimmy McGinty (Gene Hackman) "This team has underrated, they don't think you are dangerous! But you are dangerous! For you there is no tomorrow!"

2 Jerry Maguire

Cruise stars as Maguire in the film that improbably proved that a sports agent can have a heart. This Cruise is older and slicker than the All the Right Moves version. Cuba Gooding Jr. won an Oscar as fast-talking ("Show me the money!") wide receiver Rod Tidwell, while the dependable Cameron Crowe wrote and directed. At its base, though, this is as much a love story as a football tale.

1 Rudy

It is the story of an ordinary guy from a Chicago suburb, Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger., who harbored dreams of playing football at the University of Notre Dame despite significant obstacles. It was the first movie that the Notre Dame administration allowed to be shot on campus since Knute Rockne, All American in 1940.

Rudy reaches the number one spot because it touches on all of things that football, and the dream of playing football can do to make a person great. It is an iconic football film that potently exhibits the possibility inherent in the most ordinary of bodies, as Coach Ara Parseghian once said, "I wish God would put your heart in some of my players bodies. "

As Sports Illustrated once put it Rudy is about a "...classic overachiever Rudy Ruettiger (Sean Astin) who works his way from scout-team tackling dummy to notching a sack in the final game of his career, the only one in which he ever took the field. It would be impossible to believe if it wasn't true."