The great thing about great sports movies is that -- unlike watching the Super Bowl -- you don't have to understand what takes place on the field. You don't even need to know who's playing. Take last year's "Moneyball." If you went to the theaters expecting to see some great baseball, forget it. It was a great movie about what goes on behind the scenes in Major League Baseball. What was the team? Who cares? Brad Pitt plays the lead. (Psst, it was the Oakland A's.)

So, although I will be watching this year's Super Bowl with my friends, I'd like to offer up a way to participate for those who don't like the game. Here are five football films to give you something else you can do. Put in your rental requests now to be ready for Sunday.

"The Blind Side" (2009) -- The touching core of this film is presented in a humorous way. It's when perfectly made up, coiffed and manicured Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) stomps onto the field and explains to Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) that football is all about protecting his family. There's no one tougher on the field than Oher, but there's no one tougher about family than Tuohy. There are good laughs and several tear-worthy scenes in the film. In particular you have to like the bit at the end when Oher strips away his momma's tough shell for a moment. Bullock deserved her Oscar.

"Jerry Maguire" (1996) -- The morals to the story here have to do with loyalty and honesty, though it clearly doesn't hurt to be a darn good football player, either. The Maguire movie has some memorable quotes at its most frenzied and most tender moments. "Show me the money." "You complete me." "You had me at hello." People may remember Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger, but it was Cuba Gooding Jr. who won the Oscar -- a darn good supporting actor playing a darn good football player.

"Brian's Song" (1971) -- I'm making and exception to my rule about focusing on movies from after 1980 because "Brian's Song" is exceptional. Not many made-for-TV movies are great enough to go from free viewing to the theaters, but this one did. And it inspired a remake in 2001, which is another excuse. I mean, another good reason. The film is based on the true story of football great Gale Sayers and his friendship with Brian Piccolo, dying of cancer. Yes, it's sad. By the way, the Baltimore (not Indiannapolis) Colts beat the Dallas Cowboys in the Super Bowl the year this came out. 

"Little Giants" (1994) -- A minor classic, or maybe I should say a pee wee classic, since that's what it's about, pee wee football. The football is just a new backdrop for an old concept: a group of misfits taking on the best. Head misfit: Rick Moranis. Added bonus, a sexual equity subplot, with a girl as the key to winning the big game. That was important to me as a dad 15 years ago, when my daughter was a budding athlete. We watched "Little Giants" a lot. Shawna Waldron was good as Becky "Icebox" O'Shea, and later good as the daughter in "The American President," but apparently hasn't done much notable since.

"Valentine's Day" (2011) -- OK, I'm cheating on this, but if you want an airy rom com with only a hint of football, this isn't a bad choice. Eric Dane plays Sean Jackson, a professional football player who is making a big announcement on Valentine's Day that looks like it may be retirement ... but it isn't. Plenty of fluffy romantic plots going on around this, so keep your eyes open or you might miss the big announcement and the surprise of who Jackson's Valentine is.

Oh, my. I actually quite liked "Little Black Book" (2004), even though it's a Brittany Murphy movie. That's not supposed to happen. It's not as if it's  "Clueless,"  where she played the most annoying supporting character in a great film. Here Murphy has the lead role, and I didn't think she had a license to be a leading lady in a decent film. Exhibit A: "Ramen Girl," her bizarre 2008 Americanization of a fine Japanese film, "Tampopo." "Little Black Book" is somewhere between "Clueless" and  "Ramen Girl."

It has small amounts of the weaknesses that can cripple romantic comedies. Here and there are predictable happenings and situations that stretch credulity -- the two opposite qualities that always seem to co-exist in the bad rom coms. The trite and the unbelievable do not make for a good combination. And it has too many good looking people. I suffered.

"Little Black Book" also  breaks the taboo against joking about the dead, but I liked it. Toward the end of the film,  Murphy's disappointed-in-love character, Stacy, is reminded that John Lennon said life is what happens when you're making other plans. "And then he got shot," Stacy retorts. 

Stacy is good woman with a good boyfriend, but she fouls it up by going through his Palm Pilot -- pre-iPhone -- and researching his ex-girlfriends. She works for one of those horrible embarrass-the-guest reality talk shows (with Kathy Bates as the host), and uses the show as a pretext for her research. It all comes back to Jerry Springer her in the end.

The plot works better than it sounds.  The story has heart and, better still, is brave enough to break that heart without artificially patching things up. Stacy bonds with one of her beau's exes, played by Julianne Nicholson. Nicholson's face won me over. When Stacy's betrayals are revealed, the pain feels real in both their faces. The resulting losses are what the "life happens" lecture is about.

Just when Stacy is most bereft, the movie gives her new hope, and then yanks it away again. What? No happily ever after? Comedy in the classic sense demands that she gets some kind of reward in the end. She does, but it's not a romantic reward. There is also a cameo appearance in the last scene, but it's not quite who we've been led to expect throughout the film. As an audience, it can be fun to be misled like that, not  to be misled as happens to the characters in this movie.

It's not fun to be misled about the quality of the movie, either. I don't want you to think it's great, it's not. But for those of us who enjoy the catharsis of cinema love, it's a fun one and Brittany Murphy does a great job.

And then she OD'd. (Hey, if the movie can joke about tragedy, so can I.)

"The LIves of Others" (2006) definitely isn't one of those cheery, air-headed films I generally prefer, but it is a terrific movie, an Oscar winner, in fact.

The characters at the center of this German film are Georg Dreyman and Christa-Maria Sieland, a prospering playwright and a well-known actress who are lovers. Their solid affection is gradually fractured by pressures from the outside. This is East Berlin, before the Wall fell, and while Sieland feels compelled to compromise for career, Dreyman is dragged by conscience toward conflict with authorities.

That's plenty for a rich, tragic look at love, duty and betrayal. But wait, there's more. The dramatic artists have an audience: Captain Gerd Wiesler, an agent of the Stasi, the secret police charged with knowing everything that goes on and rooting out disloyalty. Wiesler's Stasi superiors sometimes come across as evil clichés, instead of the flawed humans, but that's my only quibble with this film.

Wiesler, early on, also looks like one of those stock German villains -- a by-the-book, heartless cog in the state machinery that crushes lives. That crushing role is echoed rather literally, and ironically, by the fragment of Dreyman's play, shown twice during the film. The play is meant to be anti-capitalist, rather than anti-authoritarian, but it's more universal. Wiesler, meanwhile, is gradually humanized by his own loneliness. To see him after a liaison with a prostitute is like seeing a small boy left alone after his mother leaves. Wiesler's weakness allows a tiny foothold for him to develope dangerous sympathy for the lovers as he eavesdrops on them, knowing the secrets they can't tell each other.

This is tragedy in a classic sense, with small faults of character and events leading inevitably to the downfall of the three main characters. It is redeemed at the very end with a somewhat artificial but pleasing act of forgiveness. 

It's worth noting that Sieland is played by Martina Gedeck, who played the lead in one of my favorite romantic comedies,  "Mostly Martha." Dreyman is played by Sebastian Koch, who is in the chilling Dutch film "Black Book" as a Nazi. Both films have a theme of sleeping with the enemy, but Koch is victim in one, bad guy in the other.

What if "Jerry Maguire" wasn't about Jerry Maguire, "Michael Clayton" not about Michael Clayton or "Erin Brockovich" not about  "Erin Brockovich?" 

Those wouldn't make sense, but one of the great things about "Tamara Drewe" (2010) is that it isn't all about her. Sure, she's a fine character - an attractive, young London journalist, returned to the country home of her mother. She is much changed, thanks to a nose job, and not just in her appearnce. But showing up again stirs up the countryside. Even the handsome but taciturn handy Andy Cobb gets his Wellingtons in a state over her.

Through Drewe is a big piece of the movie named for her, other characters make claims that the story is theirs. There is Cobb, who yearns for Tamara and the ancestral home that his family lost. Glen is the American scholar who has lost confidence in his writing and his ability to love. Beth is the woman who coddles her unfaithful husband and keeps Stonefield -- their farm and writers' retreat -- running. Nicholas is the philandering husband, a writer of popular mysteries. And there are others.

My favorite, truly, is the 15-year-old village girl. Angry about how she and her mother were abandoned by her  father and bored out of her adolescent mind, Jody says nearly everything with a sneer, even when dreaming aloud of shagging rock star, teen magazine idol Ben Sergeant.. She may sound dreadful, but I found her hilarious. Freckled actress Jessica Barden steals multiple scenes as Jody and blusters her way into my heart and, eventually, finds a way into her idol's arms -- though maybe not in the way she imagined.