Last night Independent Philly traveled to the Sun National Bank Center in Trenton, NJ to watch the Philadelphia Passion of the Lingerie Football League take on the Orlando Fantasy in their third game of the season. The Passion came into the game with a 2-0 record.

Our initial thought was that these ladies would be dressed in lingerie and playing glorified flag football to a crowd of gawking men. We were right about the men, but completely wrong about the football.

The women of the LFL came to play! Wearing helmets and shoulder pads they played full contact tackle football on a 50 yard indoor field that included some big time hits. One play sent a player crashing into a sound guy against the wall, and on another play the Passion laid out one of the Fantasy players so hard we thought she had been knocked out. It was wonderful.

After a short delay for techincal difficulties the players were introduced and the opening kick-off took place around 9:30PM. From that point on it was all action in the first half with the Passion scoring first and scoring often. The Fantasy managed to keep the game close at the half however.

At halftime, fans were selected to come onto the field to try to tackle some of the Passion players. The rest of the fans in attendance had to vote for a winner and picked a very portly gentleman. He took his shirt off and tried his best to tackle the Passion players but fell short (literally).

In the second half the Passion didn’t let up and scored several more touchdowns. There are no field goals in LFL. After a touchdown a team can go for one point from the 2 yard line or two points from the 5 yard line. In the end the Passion proved too much for the Fantasy and won the game (although it was closer than the score of their other home game which ended as a 60-6 blowout).

Last night’s game will appear on MTV 2 on December 17th.

After the game fans were invited to have a meet & greet with Passion players on the main concourse which turned into somewhat of a mob scene but the players were very gracious signing items for fans and taking photos with them.

The Passion play one more game this season (yes, it is only a four game regular season with playoffs in Las Vegas although the league is exploring expanding its schedule to add more games in the future) in January when they visit Tampa to take on the Breeze.

We stongly suggest checking out the Passion next season. While it’s true that the lingerie is a marketing gimic (a wonderful marketing gimic) the best action of all is watching the players attempt to destroy each other and the passion that they have for the game and for the fans. While many of the seats were filled with large groups of guys, we saw children, women, and people of all ages enjoying themselves. We are officially Passion fans.