Quotes / American Football

I don't know, friends, to this day, what it was that they was a-doin' down there, but I have studied about it, an' I think that it's some kindly of a contest where they see which bunchful of them men can take that punkin an' run from one end of that cow pasture to th' other without either gettin' knocked down or steppin' in somethin'.

— Andy Griffith, "What It Was, Was Football"

Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become.

— Mary McGrory

One reason I didn't like football was the boredom of putting on and taking off all that gear. Even so, at an early school, I made what I thought was an unusually brilliant touchdown against what proved to be, upon closer inspection, my own team.

— Gore Vidal, Palimpsest

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

This is a sport that has featured rampant drug use, gambling, player hazing, sex scandals, domestic violence issues, wayward accounting, and taxpayer abuse. And that's just the Cowboys.

— Drew Magary, Gregg Easterbrook is a Haughty Dipshit

I know plenty of normal, highly successful, otherwise level headed people that if Jeremy Maclin drops a pass or DeMeco Ryans misses a tackle, will fly into an apoplectic rage as if someone had just killed their mother while simultaneously strangling 7 puppies right in front of them. It is almost Pavlovian. The second there is a bad call, a missed block, a muffed kick, anything, it's like a switch flips and then the entire city turns into Joe Pesci after Billy Bats tells him to get his shine box. It's not pretty.

— Drew Magary, "Why Your Team Sucks 2014: Philadelphia Eagles"

In football, the object is for the Quarterback, otherwise known as the "Field General", to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense and hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy, in spite of the Blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing his aerial assault with a sustained ground attack which punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.

Ground acquisition. And that's what football is, football's a ground acquisition game. You knock the crap out of eleven guys and take their land away from them. Of course, we only do it ten yards at a time. That's the way we did it with the Indians: we won it little by little. First down in Ohio—Midwest to go!

— George Carlin

Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.

— George F. Will

Behold it now, in all its grand and terrifying splendour: the sport of American football. It’s a brutish, nasty spectacle: prone to extinguishing lives and careers with equal indifference. It is also the source of seemingly never-ending, adrenalizing fear. I know this firsthand because I spent 10 years playing football and being afraid: afraid to get hurt, afraid to lose, afraid to get beaten by my man, afraid to look stupid in front of a crowd. Every sport features this particular gauntlet of angst, but football is designed, both as a sport and as a greater American subculture, to make those fears even more conspicuous, more glaring.

— Drew Magary, "Football is Fear"

In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don't foul and don't shirk, but hit the line hard!

— Theodore Roosevelt

Gentlemen, it is better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.

— John Heisman

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