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According to SportsIllustrated - pretty much loved all these movies - football movies are becoming a genre unto their own. Ha - when was the last good movie made about sissy European 'football'?

1. Rudy (1993): Classic overachiever Rudy Ruettiger (future hobbit Sean Astin) 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 took the field. It would be impossible to believe if it wasn't true. It cements its place in the sports-movie pantheon with a script by Angelo Pizzo (Hoosiers) and the casting of Chelcie Ross (Hoosiers, Major League) as coach Dan Devine. As an added bonus, the film also brought together the young duo of Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, who would later team for the classic Swingers. To those Fighting Irish-haters who call the film hackneyed, we say: Make your own list.

2. North Dallas Forty (1979): Football's answer to Ball Four is brought alive on the screen by Nick Nolte (before he was a mug-shot punch line) and Mac Davis. The screenplay is from the book's author, Pete Gent, a former wide receiver for the Cowboys. He captures the seamy, pill-popping, violent underside of what was rapidly becoming the nation's most popular sport. The dialogue remains fresh and appropriately salty. Even better, T.O. is nowhere in sight.

3. Brian's Song (1971): The movie that made it OK for tough men to cry. James Caan plays running back Brian Piccolo while Billy Dee Williams is the great Gale Sayers. The two men, one white and one black, transform from rival Bears running backs fighting for playing time to best friends. The hankies come out when Piccolo dies from cancer. Hall of Famer Sayers was actually scheduled to play himself, but training camp intervened. It's arguably the finest made-for-TV movie in history, at least in the non-Melissa Gilbert category.

4. Horse Feathers (1932): The Marx Brothers' comedy (and musical!) classic shows that not much has changed in college football. Groucho plays the new president of Huxley College who hopes to find a quick-fix solution for the lousy football program. He tries to find his two studs-for-hire in a speakeasy rather than an Oklahoma car dealership, but in a case of mistaken identity he ends up with Harpo and Chico. Hilarity, of course, soon ensues. Anyone familiar with the super-PC state of the modern university will appreciate Groucho's big number, Whatever It Is, I'm Against It. Football fans who appreciate history but don't need sound should also catch Harold Lloyd's silent The Freshman (1925), the precursor to every underdog-makes-good sports movie in which the water boy miraculously stars in the Big Game.

5. 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 letterman 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 slugfest that makes the typical NFL contest look like a sewing circle.

6. All the Right Moves (1983): 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 that year, believably plays Stef, a high school football player desperate to earn a college scholarship as a way out of his dying Pennsylvania steel-belt town. Craig T. Nelson, years before the broad laughs of Coach, 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 midseason but still manages to land that elusive full ride thanks to his girlfriend's intercession with the coach's wife.

7. Jerry Maguire (1996): 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 but still years away from the couch-hopping madman that's loose these days. 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 and reminds us that Renee Zellweger didn't always have a British accent.

8. Heaven Can Wait (1978): Once upon a time, Warren Beatty was Hollywood's biggest heartthrob. (Just ask him.) He certainly helped his case with this yarn about a Rams quarterback who is called prematurely to heaven. He returns to the body of a tycoon and promptly buys the team, leading it to the Super Bowl a year before Vince Ferragamo did to enable sportswriters to churn out a series of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction stories. The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards.

9. Friday Night Lights (2004): If it's not quite as good as the classic nonfiction book of the same name, that's no slight. Billy Bob Thornton hits all the right notes as the high school football coach in a West Texas town that loves its Permian High Panthers -- perhaps a bit too much. Tim McGraw steals his scenes as a washed-up former player who takes his frustrations out on his running-back son. If you're not rooting full-throttle for the Panthers in their showdown with powerhouse Dallas Carter, you probably remained stoic when Bambi's mother died.

10. Remember the Titans (2000): Yes, the film unfolds in full-cliché Disney mode. But Denzel Washington as the black coach put in charge of the football team at a newly integrated Virginia high school in 1971 and Will Patton as the white coach who must swallow his pride as an assistant make it work. Don't miss My Name Is Earl's Ethan Suplee as a white newcomer to the team and town who bonds with his black teammates through the power of Motown.

Honorable mention: School Ties, Everybody's All-American, Any Given Sunday, Radio, The Waterboy, Semi-Tough, Wildcats, Paper Lion, Gus, Varsity Blues