Baseball may be America’s pastime, but filmmakers know that football is America’s passion. Football at various levels — from Pee Wee to the National Football League — has been the subject or the backdrop for many movies and documentaries. 

Often the films have climactic scenes played out on the gridiron as the clock ticks down in the final seconds. But sometimes the stories are bigger than football, touching on ambition, courage and race relations.

Football movies have been with us since the early 1920s, when such silent films as “The Freshman,” starring Harold Lloyd; “The Plastic Age,” starring Clara Bow; and “Brown of Harvard” were produced. Since then there has rarely been a year when a football movie hasn’t been made. Films on other sports are popular, too. Here’s the list of the greatest sports movies of all time.

Check the list below to see where your favorite football movies rank. You may find some others that will be worth viewing.

Click here to the greatest football movies of all time

To identify the greatest football movies of all time, 24/7 Tempo reviewed the football movies in our database with the highest index score. The index is a composite of the movies’ IMDb rating, Rotten Tomatoes audience score, and Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score. All ratings were weighted equally. Casting information comes from IMDb.