Sports Football Quotes & Sayings

No matter how you total success in the coaching profession it all comes down to a single factor - talent. There may be a hundred great coaches of whom you have never heard in basketball, football, or any sport who will probably never receive the acclaim they deserve simply because they have not been blessed with the talent. Although not every coach can win consistently with talent, no coach can win without it. — John Wooden

In football, every play, play after play, there's that physicality. Football players only play once a week, so they must really need to rest. That does kind of tell you how physical the sport is. But in hockey, you have the boards. I just couldn't say which is more physical. — Sidney Crosby

Football is only once a week. NASCAR is once a week. Those sports are insanely popular. Horse racing is oversaturated. Unless tracks cut back to three days a week of full fields, a lot of people will really hurt down the road. Horse racing, to survive, has to go to that. Let's face it: Churchill Downs only does well on Derby Week. — Rick Pitino

I did come up with the term "sack" to describe the devastation I was bringing on the poor, cringing quarterbacks in the NFL. "Sack the quarterback." That was nice. I thought it was lots better than saying, "Jones tackles the QB behind the line for another loss of yardage ... " It had a ring to it, and it caught on with the sports writers. But I tell you, doing it was a lot more fun than talking about it. — Deacon Jones

Owen Owens Field embodies the name of the team that calls it home. It's Spartan to the core. — Neil Hayes

There is no sports event like Opening Day of baseball, the sense of beating back the forces of darkness and the National Football League. — George Vecsey

When I was writing the script, I knew didn't want to make a sports movie. I was very clear that I wanted to make a sibling rivalry story. So when I was writing the script, the football was getting in the way of the drama. One day, I saw Michael Haneke's Funny Games, which is probably the most violent film I've ever seen - but the violence is off camera. When I finished watching the film, I said, 'Hey, that's what I have to do.' Haneke gave me this solution. — Carlos Cuaron

Traditionally, Seattle has been a great sports town and great football town. What the Huskies have achieved over the years has been pretty amazing. That's how I got my first taste of football - when I went with my father to Husky Stadium. — Paul Allen

Football is an honest game. It's true to life. It's a game about sharing. Football is a team game. So is life. — Joe Namath

Football is a sport of paradox. It requires reaction, not reflection. Yet you must use your mind to calculate, to anticipate - to think and not think at the same time. — Dhani Jones

Football is a team sport and not an individual sport. We win as a team, and every individual is better if we are part of the team. — Fernando Torres

We need to look at our nannying, mollycoddled, politically correct culture in my view, which stops kids from going out and playing competitive sport. I also think we need to look at the shear fatness of the regulations which control people who want to help kids play sport. — Boris Johnson

Football, basketball, and the Olympic sports all have their problems with banned substances. — Jim Sensenbrenner

I think it is high time that Europe starts to understand that we do not rule the world anymore, and that some former European imperial powers can no longer impress their will on to others in far away places, and we must accept that football has moved away from being a European and South American sport: it has become the World Sport that billions of fans are excitedly following every week, everywhere in the world. — Sepp Blatter

My favorite sport is football. I'm a die hard Steelers fan. Favorite players were Hines Ward and Greg Lloyd. — Anthony Jeselnik

Finally, if you will permit me, I'd like to make a comment which in my mind, is indicative, perhaps, of the greater significance of football and sports emphasis in general in this country, and that is, I thank God I was warring on the gridirons of the Midwest and not on the battlefields of Europe. I can speak confidently and positively that the players of this country would much more, much rather, struggle and fight to win the Heisman award than the Croix de guerre. — Nile Kinnick

In the world of football and of sport in general there is still a taboo around homosexuality. Everyone ought to live freely with themselves, their desires and their sentiments. We must all work for a sporting culture that respects the individual in every manifestation of his truth and freedom. — Cesare Prandelli

Hell, no! A tie is like kissing your sister! — Bear Bryant

My son has taken liking for sports and is most of the time playing cricket and football. It is so much fun being with them, as I'm enjoying every phase of motherhood. — Karisma Kapoor

Football is a sport of emotions, and we have to capture that in our films. — Steve Sabol

One reason I won't compromise is because I believe honesty helps you win over the long haul. You can win a game tomorrow and lose a team. You can lose a game tomorrow and win a football team. — Lou Holtz

In football, it's the ultimate team sport. You have to have good people around you as a quarterback for things to happen. — Warren Moon

I feel like football players are overworked and underpaid compared to any other sports. — Terrell Owens

Everybody who plays top-level sport, whether it's golf or football, or whatever, needs to get into 'The Zone' ... For me personally, on the morning of a round, preparation is always about getting into the zone. The less I communicate with other people, the better. I'm trying to rehearse in my mind what I am working on in my game: going through my swing keys, going through my putting keys. When I get to the course I get the pin positions for the day and I'll analyze those. I'll make a strategy for the golf course and look how I'm going to play it — Paul McGinley

Baseball, football, basketball - these quintessentially American pastimes are recognizably sports because they involve play: they are games. One plays football, one doesn't play boxing ... The boxing match is the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind's collective aggression; its ongoing historical madness. — Joyce Carol Oates

De La Salle hung on for the 28-21 victory. Afterward, Ladouceur stood before his exhausted team. It was by far the biggest victory in school history at the time, but the coach noticed that several of his players wore masks of disappointment.

"It's OK to feel disappointed if you didn't play your absolute best," he told them. "That's what we're all about. — Neil Hayes

Age does not count. It's what you know about football that matters. — David Peace

They told me exactly how it worked, the marketing of it. Our target market was always going to be young teenage girls, because boys are into sports, and they like buying jerseys and caps and so on, for baseball or football, things of that nature, whereas the girls are totally enthralled with the band. . . . They don't have money, but they have access to a large supply of it: their aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, who would spend money on them for a concert or merchandise sooner than they would spend it on themselves. — John Seabrook

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters. — Stephen Graham Jones

The principle is competing against yourself. It's about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before. — Steve Young

You're going to have injuries, danger and glory in every sport. What makes football unique is that every person on that team needs to count on everybody else. It's the ultimate team game and you have to depend on your coaches, you have to depend on your support staff, you have to depend on your teammates. — Tim Tebow

I got into running because I was too uncoordinated to play baseball, too small for basketball, and too tiny for football. I lived in a broken home and had looked to those sports as a way of staying away from my home. — Gerry Lindgren

Mostly I play sports games - football and basketball. 'Inside Drive' and 'NFL Fever.' — Paul Pierce

I think as far as any kind of pressure on a football team or on an individual in professional sports really depends not only on that individual but the leadership they have on the team and the leadership they have on the coaching staff. A lot of times, they can divert some of those pressures off of the individual and off of the team. — Jimmy Johnson

ESPN, is having the ability to foretell future outcomes in sports. — Anthony Liccione

Thank you ... fantasy football draft, for letting me know that even in my fantasies, I am bad at sports. — Jimmy Fallon

We will use some kind of option and we will throw the football. I hope it will be at our people. — Lou Holtz

I am very obsessed with ballet now because it is a very difficult sport and a beautiful one because it is not about money. It's not like playing football or tennis - dance has no sponsors, it's just for the beauty. Maybe it is the only last pure sport. — Carine Roitfeld

Don't let society's labels
hold you back. If you have a
true passion for something
whether its sports, art,
science, etc ... don't believe
anyone who says you can't do
it because you're a girl. If you
want to play baseball, hockey,
or football, don't let anyone
tell you that you can't. If you
want to play with Hot Wheel
cars and Legos, then do it.
Only you are the boss of you — Alison G. Bailey

Why isn't it fun to watch a videotape of last night's football game even when we don't know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts! — Daniel M. Gilbert

Love of sports will always break your heart, but in doing so, it reminds us we have one. — Stuart Stevens

If we had played Poly a hundred more times that year we wouldn't have beaten them again. On that night we found a way. It was an unbelievable thing. It was a marvelous, miraculous win." -Coach Frank Allocco — Neil Hayes

You know, I never looked down the road and said, 'Hey look, one day, the Hall of Fame.' It's always about playing each and every game 100 percent and I thank my teammates for getting me into the Hall because football is a team sport, not an individual sport. — Jerry Rice

February is always a bad month for TV sports. Football is gone, basketball is plodding along in the annual midseason doldrums, and baseball is not even mentioned. — Hunter S. Thompson

I'm a football fan, a sports fan, a fan of competition. — Matthew McConaughey

Football is an art form in itself. All sports are. — Chris Zylka

Wrestling is the only sport I've ever competed in that puts you totally in a situation of constant motion without breaks. I could play football or baseball, swim
but there's always some kind of situation that would break my thoughts, break my concentration. — Dan Gable

A tie is like kissing your sister. — Duffy Daugherty

The tradition in Serbia has always been team sports - football, basketball, handball, volleyball and water polo, individual sports are not supported. — Novak Djokovic

Football's the biggest game in the world. America's the greatest sporting nation there is. To play some part in putting those two things together: why wouldn't I be excited about that? — David Beckham

I went to Dartmouth College, graduated, and had the opportunity to play two professional sports - I played for the New England Patriots in the NFL and professional lacrosse for the Boston Blazers. I had an injury, so I had to stop so I could heal. But when I was playing football, I wasn't making a lot of money; I wasn't a superstar. — Brian J. White

I ain't never had much fun. I ain't never been two inches away from a football. Here guys go fishing on the day of the game, hunting, golfing, and all I want to do is be alone, studying how not to lose. — Bear Bryant

I'm a big sports fan. College football is my favorite. — Verne Troyer

Absurdly, I haven't yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, its lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destroy big men ... in a way that they can't in other contact sports, and the way that t he best team does not necessarily win. And there's the athleticism ... , and the way that strength and intelligence have to combine. It allows players to look beautiful and balletic in a way that some sports do not: a perfectly-timed diving header, or a perfectly-struck volley, allow the body to achieve a poise and grace that some sportsmen can never exhibit. — Nick Hornby

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts. — Shirley Chisholm

The function of football, soccer, basketball and other passion-sports in modern industrial society is the transference of boredom, frustration, anger and rage into socially acceptable forms of combat. A temporary substitute for war; for nationalism; identification with something bigger than the self. — Edward Abbey

Where is it written in the Constitution that because a guy played football, he has the automatic right to sit in that booth? How hard is football? If I've spent thirty-five years as a sportswriter, you think I don't know you get six for a touchdown? You think I don't know that? You think I don't know you get three for a field goal? C'mon, c'mon. And I can actually speak English okay, so that would be a difference between me and a guy who spent his whole life playing football. Now, not all of them are like that, but it's that thinking that says, "We have divine right of booth." No, you don't. No you don't. — Tony Kornheiser

I like both athletic girls and girly girls. It depends on their personality. I like girls who can go out and play sports with me and throw the football around, but you don't want a girl who's too much tougher than you. I like brainy girls who can respond to what I'm saying. — Josh Hutcherson

But how a game plan came to be, what a finished plan looked like, I had no idea. I'd heard that all copies were shredded as soon as the game was over. — Nicholas Dawidoff

Rowing, particularly sculling, inflicts on the individual in every race a level of pain associated with few other sports. There was certainly pain in football during a head-on collision, pain in other sports on the occasion of a serious injury. That was more the threat of pain; in rowing there was the absolute guarantee of it every time. — David Halberstam

People don't have to go to cable news or network news. Live sports is the one of many things that's kind of community television. There are a lot of people who still tune in to "Sunday Night Football" or "Thursday Night Football" the way they did before. — Henry Blodget

Football is not a contact sport. Its a collision sport — Duffy Daugherty

My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It's such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It's just a fantastic little book. — Chad Harbach

He'd never considered sweet and conservative to be so hot, but damn, Emma wore it well. — Jami Davenport

I didn't win prom king. By that point, I'd quit sports except for soccer, so I was really just a theater guy. I totally lost to the captain of the football team. — Patrick Wilson

I grew up playing sports, football, basketball, baseball, everything, and acting was such a different environment and different world for me. — Cam Gigandet

I look at athletes in all sports and try to picture what kind of football player they'd be, what position they'd play and so on. — Lou Holtz

A lot of football success is in the mind. you must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are. — Bill Shankly

I think we have our sports within our own culture that are huge with baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Those are the sports in America that we grow up with and soccer isn't really there yet. — Claudio Reyna

Wisdom of the Ages "Assault and Battery" Weather forecast for the St. Louis Rams next Sunday in Seattle. — Matthew D. Heines

Life is full of all sorts of setbacks and twists and turns and disappointments. The character of this team will be how well you will come back from this letdown, this defeat. You could still be a great team and you can still accomplish great things as football players but it's going to take a real resolve to do it." -Coach Ladouceur — Neil Hayes

I don't think you can explain why all these other sports and college basketball have a fair representation of African American coaches, but college football doesn't. You can dig and scramble and scratch, but at the end of the day I think it's just pure, old-fashioned racism. — Frank Deford

My job happens to be sports-related, so it's like my duty to watch football. It's my job. But that's not a change for me. When you're 18, it's life and death, because you don't have a kid, and it's a much bigger deal when you're 18. Having a kid - when the Vikings lost the 2009 NFC title game, it sucked, and I'm not happy about it, but my kid is still alive. You have to have that horrible forced perspective that you don't want. — Drew Magary

The point about football in Britain is that it is not just a sport people take to, like cricket or tennis. It is built into the urban psyche, as much a common experience to our children as are uncles and school. It is not a phenomenon : it is an everyday matter. — Arthur Hopcraft

Once you become an owner of a team, you get so much more into the sport and you can't help it. So I really love NFL football now to the degree of following it much more than I did previously. — Paul Allen

I tried golf for a while, but I wasn't very good at it, so I didn't play a lot of golf. I enjoy all sports, not just football. I like basketball, baseball, and I got into the World Cup. So really, sports in general are my life, and football specifically. — John Madden

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught. — Ambrose Bierce

The entire existence of the NFL - and of football at any level, for all of that - rests on whether or not the game can keep fooling itself, and its paying fan base, that it is somehow superior to boxing and to the rest of our modern blood sports. — Charlie Pierce

In order to play some sports there's quite a big cost implication, whereas football is relatively cheap. All you need is a ball and a couple of jumpers to practise. — Hope Powell

I come from an area where it's mostly, like, football and basketball, those are the sports. So my brother started surfing ... I used to make fun of him for it, and then he challenged me to do it, and I'm a huge competitor, and I did it ,and I got hooked. — Manny Montana

It's the best thing to happen to a sport, that you have a superstar. In football there is always something to write about the Beckhams, same as people want to write about Rooney or Hooney or whatever his bloody name is. — Bernie Ecclestone

Probably no one here knows I coached a football team - a service team - playing against Georgetown. I think it was in the fall of 1924 Lou Little was your coach, and he beat us. But it was a very happy circumstance, because it brought me the friendship of another man, Lou Little, who to this day remains my very warm associate and friend. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

He dribbles a lot and the opposition don't like it - you can see it all over their faces — Ron Atkinson

If I stayed a football player, my career would have been over 20 years ago. As it is, my knees are shot. I found I got the same good feeling in acting that I had in sports, but I found I could have a more profound impact on people. — William Petersen

Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pele. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man. — Pele

I like a lot of sports. Especially football - it's my favourite sport. My uncle played football in Barcelona for nine years and played for Spain in three World Cups. — Rafael Nadal

Football isn't a contact sport, it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport. — Duffy Daugherty

Of all sports, football seems to be the most sanctioned homosocial opportunity for straight men to be with each other, pat butts, struggle, strive, and take showers together. All that talk of tight ends and penetration. The reason there are face masks on those helmets is so that can't kiss each other. — Kate Clinton

I went to a football school, which meant that I went to a university that served up education and was simultaneously operating a sports franchise. — Susan Orlean

In football, time and space are the same thing. — Graham Taylor

My prescription for women entering the war zone of the professions: study football ... Women who want to remake the future should look for guidance not to substitute parent figures but to the brash assertions of pagan sport. — Camille Paglia

Pro Football Hall of Famer is something that everyone recognizes as the pinnacle of any achievement in sport. All the fame and all the recognition that we single out in various industries, the Pro Football Hall of Fame is really special. — John Riggins

He wants to play major college football at a university far away, where nobody will know about his tragic family history. Then he wants to play in the NFL.

Every catch brings him closer to that reality. That's how he thinks of it, anyway. Every time he runs downfield, sees the ball in the air, and hears the defensive back laboring to catch up, whenever he feels that ball fall out of the sky and into his waiting hands, he inches closer to his goals. — Neil Hayes

If this can be termed the century of the common man, then soccer, of all sports, is surely his game ... In a world haunted by the hydrogen and napalm bomb, the football field is a place where sanity and hope are still left unmolested. — Stanley Rous

Football is all about sentiment; if it weren't then we'd all support Manchester United. — Mark O'Brien

He hadn't developed into the accomplished running quarterback many had predicted he would become over the course of the season.

But he had come to personify this team. He was raw and untested when the season began, but he played his two best games in the two biggest games on the schedule. He wasn't the player anybody expected him to be, but he got the job done-at times spectacularly. — Neil Hayes

Until Sammy Baugh - pro football in Texas was a one-paragraph story on the third page of the Monday sports section. — Dan Jenkins

I've always been a fan of football, always watched the NFL and it's great to always sit back wherever I can this year. You sit back and enjoy the games, pop a little sports drink - not any pop or soda - lay back, watch the games. It's always cool to see how the games go down and just enjoy them. — Rob Gronkowski

For a kid who's lost his mom and all the rage and grief that no one was able to talk out of me, football was a very therapeutic sport. Very. — Jon Hamm

I wanted to have a career in sports when I was young, but I had to give up the idea. I'm only six feet tall, so I couldn't play basketball. I'm only 190 pounds, so I couldn't play football, and I have 20/20 vision, so I couldn't be a referee. — Jay Leno