Quotations about Football

Football is, after all, a wonderful way to get rid of your aggressions without going to jail for it. ~Heywood Hale Brown


Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: [from academe] A modern school where football is taught. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


Most football players are temperamental. That's 90 percent temper and 10 percent mental. ~Doug Plank


Let's face it, you have to have a slightly recessive gene that has a little something to do with the brain to go out on the football field and beat your head against other human beings on a daily basis. ~Tim Green


You have to play this game like somebody just hit your mother with a two-by-four. ~Dan Birdwell


Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings. ~George F. Will


Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors. ~Frank Gifford


Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence. ~Erma Bombeck


If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead. ~Erma Bombeck


If you're mad at your kid, you can either raise him to be a nose tackle or send him out to play on the freeway. It's about the same. ~Bob Golic


At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact. ~George Plimpton


Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field? ~Jim Bouton


One of the great disappointments of a football game is that the cheerleaders never seem to get injured. ~Author Unknown


American football makes rugby look like a Tupperware party. ~Sue Lawley, 1985


Football is not a contact sport. It's a collision sport. Dancing is a good example of a contact sport. ~Duffy Daugherty


When I went to Catholic high school in Philadelphia, we just had one coach for football and basketball. He took all of us who turned out and had us run through a forest. The ones who ran into the trees were on the football team. ~George Raveling


The reason women don't play football is because eleven of them would never wear the same outfit in public. ~Phyllis Diller


Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become. ~Mary McGrory


Is there a point at which every Sunday during the NFL season ceases to make a man feel like a kid on Christmas morning? ~Mike Alexander, MADfit.com


Football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbalized, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time. ~Arnold Mandell


I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me. ~Anna Quindlen, Living Out Loud, 1988


College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture. ~Elbert Hubbard


Watching football is like watching pornography. There's plenty of action, and I can't take my eyes off it, but when it's over, I wonder why the hell I spent an afternoon doing it. ~Luke Salisbury



There are two kinds of people in the world, Notre Dame lovers and Notre Dame haters. And, quite frankly, they're both a pain in the ass. ~Dan Devine, former Notre Dame football coach


The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean. ~Erma Bombeck


Beer and Rugby are more or less synonymous. ~Chris Laidlaw, 1973


Rugby football is a game I can't claim absolutely to understand in all its niceties, if you know what I mean. I can follow the broad, general principles, of course. I mean to say, I know that the main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end and that, in order to squalch this programme, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellowman which, if done elsewhere, would result in fourteen days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench. ~P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves, 1930


I have seen women walk right past a TV set with a football game on and - this always amazes me - not stop to watch, even if the TV is showing replays of what we call a "good hit," which is a tackle that causes at least one major internal organ to actually fly out of a player's body. ~Dave Barry


I like to believe that my best hits border on felonious assault. ~Jack Tatum


He was the only man I ever saw who ran his own interference. ~Steve Owen, about Bronko Nagurski


Trying to maintain order during a legalized gang brawl involving 80 toughs with a little whistle, a hanky and a ton of prayer. ~Anonymous referee, explaining his job


There are several differences between a football game and a revolution. For one thing, a football game usually lasts longer and the participants wear uniforms. Also, there are usually more casualties in a football game. The object of the game is to move a ball past the other team's goal line. This counts as six points. No points are given for lacerations, contusions, or abrasions, but then no points are deducted, either. Kicking is very important in football. In fact, some of the more enthusiastic players even kick the ball, occasionally. ~Alfred Hitchcock


Men are clinging to football on a level we aren't even aware of. For centuries, we ruled everything, and now, in the last ten minutes, there are all these incursions by women. It's our Alamo. ~Tony Kornheiser


Speed is not your fastest, but your slowest man. No back can run faster than his interference. ~Jock Sutherland


It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands. ~George Santayana


When it comes to football, God is prejudiced - toward big, fast kids. ~Chuck Mills


Australian Rules football might best be described as a game devised for padded cells, played in the open air. ~Jim Murray


Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers. ~Merle Kessler


Speed, strength, and the inability to register pain immediately. ~Reggie Williams, when asked his greatest strengths as a football player


Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen. Soccer is a gentleman's game played by beasts. Football is a beastly game played by beasts. ~Henry Blaha, 1972


What about football? Is it a sport or a concussion? ~Jim Murray, Los Angeles Times


The tactical difference between Association Football and Rugby with its varieties seems to be that in the former the ball is the missile, in the latter men are the missiles. ~Alfred E. Crawley, The Book of the Ball, 1913