American football looks like a really complex sport. Players serve very specialized roles on teams whose strategies vary a great deal. Rules and regulations change every year, and inform a pretty complex set of norms and standards for acceptable decisions and actions by both players and coaches. It's equipment intensive, almost gaudily so, and dripping with a culture of fan identity and traditions that make it incomparably diverse and odd.
But it's still a variation of the larger sport of football. It's still a game that involves two teams of 11 players moving a ball down a field towards an area that results in a score.