Trackback to posts on ESPN, CBS Sports, Sportsline, etc blogs. They have a high reader base, and if you are one of the first track backs on a popular posts, you'll get a lot of hits.
There are a large numbe of sports-related forums for Football. FInd one that doesn;t use nofollow tags. Just put you link in the sig and make a few posts about the Seattle Seahawks or the Dallas Cowboys or whatever team you like.
Put up youtube videos of highlights from various popular college and pro teams. The best way of course is SEO but football is a huge niche that is hard to rank for. Also post on football message boards and give relative posts on blogs as well. Also make sure people can subscribe via feedburner through email. One of my websites has around 4,500 people on the subscriber list and it definitely helps with daily readers coming back.
find other football blogs then put the URL in here to see their backlinks: http://www.backlinkwatch.com
You can find some news on football sites or newspapers and post this news to forums and newsgroups. Before you need to convert source url with some url redirection system and put your site ad at the top of this page. On that way you can get very big traffic. Try to do this at LongURL.Net