Quotes & Sayings About The Game Of Football

The essence of Reality TV is all about drama. So, I think bringing pressure is healthy whether it's a professional chef or a domestic chef. Because the only way ever to really identify the true purpose of how good they are is submerging them under pressure. So I say it's no different than a live football game because it's about the intensity. — Gordon Ramsay

At a play-off game with the Chargers, goose bumps ran down my arms as I rushed through the smoke-filled tunnel onto the field. The energy and voices of 70,000 screaming fans can turn even a veteran player's determined squint into the wide eyes of a child on Christmas morning.
While the cheerleaders performed and urged on the crowd, running back Danny Woodhead turned to me. "Can you believe we get to do this? — Jake Byrne

It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice. — Natalie Goldberg

While executives don't age nearly as fast as athletes do, companies, markets, and technologies change a thousand times faster than the game of football. As — Ben Horowitz

Yorkie has officially retired about 5 times ... The man's a clown ... People are going on about the game and agents and directors of football and managers losing their jobs, but we should be worried about people like him ... Clowns. That's the last time I'm going to say clown ... If he's the vice-president of FIFA, God help us all. — Roy Keane

Not much of what he said was original. What made him unique was the fact
that he had no sense of detachment at all. He was like the fanatical football fan who
runs onto the field and tackles a player. He saw life as the Big Game, and the whole
of mankind was divided into two teams
Sala's Boys, and The Others. The stakes
were fantastic and every play was vital
and although he watched with a nearly
obsessive interest, he was very much the fan, shouting unheard advice in a crowd of
unheard advisors and knowing all the while that nobody was paying any attention to
him because he was not running the team and never would be. And like all fans he
was frustrated by the knowledge that the best he could do, even in a pinch, would be
to run onto the field and cause some kind of illegal trouble, then be hauled off by
guards while the crowd laughed. — Hunter S. Thompson

Have we become a cupcake league? We already have better helmets and gear. Wonder how the old school players feel about this. Not in the back of minds when talking about 18 game season so let's play football please ... Even guys using shoulders to hit are getting flagged for helmet-to-helmet. Defense is getting sloppy because guys are avoiding fines and will get worse if suspending comes into play. — Phillip Daniels

Football is the love of my life. I would never say I don't want to play. Somebody could say that this game is meaningless. Who is it meaningless to? I guess people who are watching the game? Or the people who are playing it? It's definitely not meaningless to us. — Shawne Merriman

I don't remember Bill Walsh being old. I remember young Bill Walsh. He wasn't gray-haired, and neither was I when we first met. His legacy will live on. Bill Walsh's name and his accomplishments will be remembered and revered so long as the great game of football is played. — Marv Levy

The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It's part of our culture like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays beyond their meaning, a factor in our economy. — Bob Schieffer

People are always rattling on about what "we" should do, whether they are talking about "their" country or "their" race or all of humanity or some other abstract group of humans who don't give a damn what they think about anything.

Who is "We?" Who can you legitimately speak for? Who cares what you say?

If you don't know, you're just running our mouth. You're just some guy yelling at the TV during a football game. Your "we" can't hear you and if they could, they wouldn't care anyway. — Jack Donovan

Football is one of those games that definitely relates to life in a lot of ways. Everything can be going good, and just like that, you have a turnover. Things are going south, you're going the opposite direction. How are you going to recover from it? That's the beauty in this game. — Torrey Smith

Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are
retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on. — Edward Abbey

I left hating the game of football ... I never ever wanted to play football after that and I kind of rode off into the sunset. — Randall Cunningham

It really doesn't matter to me whether it's defensive end or linebacker. I just want to play the game of football. I've been working on linebacker drills since I got out to Fischer Sports in Phoenix. — Gaines Adams

Soccer is a continuous game, rugby is a continuous game, but for the physical elements that are involved in playing a football game and the number of plays that you play, I don't know that it was ever intended to be a continuous game. — Nick Saban

I haven't seen anyone rely on the ground game this much since the battle of Verdun. — Dennis Miller

The game of life is a lot like football. You have to tackle your problems, block your fears, and score your points when you get the opportunity. — Lewis Grizzard

The game [football] has moved on a lot but still, ask most players and they will tell you that pre-season isn't their favourite time of the year. — Colin Kazim-Richards

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

This kind of directing, I think, is very similar to being a football coach. You prepare your players and place them in the right places, but once the game is on, there's nothing much you can do - you can smoke a cigarette or get nervous, but you can't do much. — Abbas Kiarostami

Once people couldn't trust the college game, some checked out the pro game, but that was in big trouble, too. We had no clock and a lot of faults. People looked at the slow pace and at big guys like George Mikan and said pro basketball was just for overgrown pituitary cases. Baseball and football were numbers one and two and pro basketball wasn't even in the same universe. — Dolph Schayes

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know, heartbroken by a football game. An endless stream flowing to an audience of everyone and no one. — Alena Graedon

When we're recovering from a spiritual fumble, we must realize everyone does stupid stuff. No one is exempt. An occasional misstep doesn't brand us as stupid - it makes us real. God loves us regardless of our mishaps. After a fumble, do as any good football player would. Fight to recover what you lost, get back into the game, and let the Creator turn your loss into a gain. With Him, in spite of our fumbles we can rise to great heights. — Jake Byrne

Sports like baseball or baseball are easy to dramatise, because all of them have a pause and that helps with the tension. Football never stops. I'm a football fan. I believe in the beauty of the game. — Carlos Cuaron

I get asked about the best games I've called, and as far as college football goes, the Florida-LSU environment was as good as I've ever been around. I had always heard about night games at Tiger Stadium and had never gotten the chance to call one. It was really special to be a part of that and then the game, my gosh, how can anybody ever forget that. The fourth quarter and LSU's final drive, that's something I'll always remember. — Verne Lundquist

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

As you understand the game of football, you understand that it is about wins and losses. — Tyrone Willingham

It never changes. Football is a game of repetition, mental and physical. You may try to articulate it a little different, but it's the same thing: Get better players, make fewer mistakes, and drill the fundamentals into your players' heads. The rest of it is a joke. Teams aren't winning because of what they had for breakfast of what some coach said in the locker room. — Barry Switzer

But I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game — F Scott Fitzgerald

I grew up in Europe, and soccer was the first organized game I played. When we moved back to the U.S. in the middle of 4th grade, I switched to American football and stopped playing competitively until college, when I played intramurals. — Andrew Luck

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 always suggest something fast and simple so you have more time to share with friends; and when we think of the ultimate food to serve for a football game, only one thing comes to mind - wings! — Marcus Samuelsson

In the game of football, you need to be strong, and at my position, you need to be able to put up a good fight. So I work on my upper body and lower body strength because your body's got to be able to last. — LaMarr Woodley

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

Before replays, football telecasts were filled with dead spots ... It really destroyed the momentum of the telecasts. Replays gave you something to show during the pauses. It seemed to make the game go faster. — Tony Verna

I feel that World Cup cricket should be played like football in which all the 160 countries take part. If only a handful of countries are going to keep on playing in the World Cup without making the game popular, I will be a sad man. — Kapil Dev

A yoga session is harder than a football practice easily for me. Probably in some ways just as intense, not from a physical standpoint of hitting ,but from a game, the intensity is the same. — Andrew Whitworth

I don't think the world of football is so serious. It's important to have distance about things and about yourself. If we believe we are kings or gods, we become crazy. We all know it's a game and we all enjoy it together. — Eric Cantona

I grew up trying to be like my idols, and one of the main people in my life was my father. He played football, and when your father is telling stories about the game he played ... Everybody wants to be like their father. — Cam Newton

How on earth can otherwise sensible people get so involved in a football game? You could measure the lasting impact on the lives of the people who played it at just about zero. — Alan Page

I don't know how we could use it to improve the job that umpires do, ... The human element in sport has always been a big part of the game. I'm a football fan, too, and I hate instant replay in the NFL. Football games are taking four hours. — Bud Selig

After four years of playing [the school fight song] for every pep rally, at the start of every half of every football game, after every score, at the end of the game, and at random times when the team needed a boost, it was forever drilled into my psyche. — Shanna Swendson

The beginning of my love for football goes back to when I was seven years old. I was spending time with my grandmother, Caletha Vick. I never knew anything about the game until one Sunday afternoon when she turned on the television because the Redskins were playing. They were my Uncle Casey's favorite team-and my grandmother's favorite too. After watching the game with them, I was hooked. — Michael Vick

The chairmen of the largest companies in the world can cancel an appointment or move a board meeting; a manager cannot change the date of a game. In the combined 42 years that Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger have managed in English football, I can only remember one occasion when Sir Alex did not attend a Manchester United game. — Howard Wilkinson

People are paralyzed on a football field. People die. You just never know when it's going to be your last moment. I was the kind of guy who would never talk to my wife on game day. Now I'm the guy who's like, 'I love you.' I want my children to know I love them because I don't know what's going to happen out there. — Troy Polamalu

The wonderful science behind taking the chastity pill is to preserve honor, respect, purity and worth. Again, the value of a woman's future is dependent on how well she blocks any advances, foul balls, interceptions or explorations.
It's no surprise I question everything. What does going to the movies have to do with my vagina? What does going to the grocery store at ten pm at night to pick up a package of brownie mix have to do with my vagina? Why is ok for me not to go to a high school football game? Does wearing a tank top instead of a short sleeve shirt compromise my vagina shield? Do I have an Anti-Vagina Defense security chip installed on me that I'm not aware of, one that only works with loose clothing? — Sadiqua Hamdan

Angell and Marzluff once spotted an airborne group of crows playing with a ball of paper above a University of Washington football game. One crow would carry the ball a few wing lengths and then drop it, at which point the others would dive in, the fastest one snatching it from the air. They repeated rounds of this corvid quidditch over and over again, causing attention in the stands to stray from the earthbound athletes. And at the University of Montana, a crow learned to gather up small packs of dogs by whistling and calling what for all the world sounded like "Here, boy!" The bird would lead the dogs on frenzied chases across campus for no apparent reason. To — Nathanael Johnson

I love football. I love the aesthetics of football. I love the athleticism of football. I love the movement of the players, the antics of the coaches. I love the dynamism of the fans. I love their passion for their badge and the colour of their team and their country. I love the noise and the buzz and the electricity in the stadium. I love the songs. I love the way the ball moves and then it flows and the way a teams fortune rises and falls through a game and through a season. But what I love about football is that it brings people together across religious divides, geographic divides, political divides. I love the fact that for ninety minutes in a rectangular piece of grass, people can forget hopefully, whatever might be going on in their life, and rejoice in this communal celebration of humanity. The biggest diverse, invasive or pervasive culture that human kinds knows is football and I love the fact that at the altar of football human kind can come worship and celebrate. — Andy Harper

I grew up wrestling and playing football where, at the end of the game, you have a score and you're either the winner of loser. There's no score in acting, but you qualify your level of success by the people that you work with and the amount of exposure that you have. — Eddie McClintock

When I was a child I had a dream to become a football player. I always played as I played when I was a child. I tried to improve. I never dreamt of becoming a professional football player, I dreamed just to play with the best players in the best team. I never dreamed to be paid to play. I would have paid to play an FA Cup Final in front of 80,000 people in Wembley. I just tried to play the wonderful game that football is. So, I hope young players will still have this dream. — Eric Cantona

A team is not made up of isolated individuals. Always stay in the game. Don't be passive. Football is a team game. No one plays alone. Success depends on your whole team being a single unit. — Pele

The real fans of football come from the working class. Now they cannot afford to come and watch the game. — Eric Cantona

Football has been good to me. Everyone has their destiny, but you have to make use of the opportunities. I have spent 15 years at the top of my game. It makes me happy. I love the game. I love scoring goals. But I have always taken it seriously. It is not what the game gives you, it is what you give it. — George Weah

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

There are things players go through on an everyday basis in the business of football. You don't see it all with the glitz and glamour of game day. — Terrell Owens

College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity. — H.L. Mencken

I do know it's great to have a support from a fan base of a team. Football is such a team game, such a team aspect to it ... Good things happen, the praise is spread around; and bad things happen, usually it's not just one person's fault. — Andrew Luck

As long as I feel the love of the game and my health is good, I'm going to play. I don't want to be one of these guys who stays too long or regrets leaving early. Football has been great to me. — Justin Tuck

In high school football, the coach kept me on the bench all year. On the last game of the season, the crowd was yelling, We want Youngman! We want Youngman! The coach says, Youngman - go see what they want! — Henny Youngman

I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting. — George Orwell

It is well documented that I am a lifelong football fan. My love of the British game started with the 1966 World Cup. — Alisher Usmanov

The one great thing about football is that whatever happens it will manifest itself on the pitch. If it's right, you'll see it on the pitch, if it's wrong, it will be on the pitch. In business you can get fellas who are doing crooked deals and nobody knows anything about it. There is an ultimate honesty about football. Politics is part of the lying game, I wouldn't trust any of them. In football you can hide for a while, but ultimately the truth comes out. I always loved that. — Johnny Giles

Football is for the fans. It can be the greatest game in the world but if there are no people to watch it, it becomes nothing. The fans are the lifeblood of the game. — Jock Stein

On the second night here, the Koreans played and the streets had to be closed down to traffic for half a day before the game. In a remarkable coincidence, everyone came to town wearing the same type of red T-shirt. The Koreans gathered like a huge blob of ketchup and went mad in a quiet, Dufferlike way. You haven't seen crowds until you've seen Korean crowds. They gathered. They cheered in unison. They clapped and exuberated.
Then they tidied up after themselves and went home.
If you ever have to have half-a-million people in your house for a function, make sure they are Koreans. — Tom Humphries

To recognize that head injuries were as essential a part of football as they are of boxing would be to erase the fine distinction on which the game's respectability rested. — Charlie Pierce

The game of football is one of strategy and tactics. — Woody 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

Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brick-yard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smell: of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a back lot in a small town. — Walker Percy

I've enjoyed my time in the game, whether it be managing Luton in the top flight, taking Spurs to Wembley or, as director of football, pinpointing players such as Jermain Defoe, Paul Robinson and Robbie Keane with real sell-on value. — David Pleat

Theres something incredible about putting a helmet on just before a game; its a feeling only a football player knows. Your vision narrows, and the whole world shrinks. You cant hear much of what goes on outside you, but you can hear yourself breathe and you can feel yourself sweat. — Carl Deuker

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey. — Terry Eagleton

The things that are happening to me are unbelievable. I'm actually busier right now than when I played football. This is almost like I'm coming back out of retirement. It will be fun to see myself in the game. — Jerry Rice

1980 Fun Fact #1: Mattel releases the Intellivision video game console. Our video game addiction began with the likes of "Baseball," "Football," and "Night Stalker. — Tom Harvey

You can play and try to get focused for that time, but still the reality of that whole situation is once that game is over you still have to be confronted with what's going on. I think that's where the senior leadership on your football team has to come. They have to understand that we have a responsibility to reach our goals and that's to win the championship. — Pete Richardson

You don't hear a film director saying 'Money mustn't go out of the industry' to actors. You don't hear a concert promoter saying 'We must make sure that money doesn't go out of our industry' to Elton John. Some people in football seem to think, 'Never mind the players, let's get on with the game.' — Gordon Taylor

We [with husband] try and spend time alone, which is really hard to do. Of course, when you have kids they're like: "Why are you going out? You went out last night ... you can't go out tonight!" so, you try to do that, and you try and ask somebody to please turn off the football game because you can't stand it any longer and you'd rather talk to them.You try to make time for each other where you can. You try to plan a trip away somewhere. — Julianne Moore

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

When I look back at football, I've always said to myself, 'I'd rather leave the game and have something in my tank rather than have left all of me out on the field.' — Richard Seymour

For years in football I was angry with the game, angry with pundits and, a lot of the time, angry with the journalists writing about me. All that changed when I got my break in movies. — Vinnie Jones

The coaching profession has lost one of its true legends. Though he was best known for winning more football games than any other coach when he retired, Eddie Robinson's impact on coaching and the game of football went far beyond wins and losses. He brought a small school in northern Louisiana from obscurity to nationwide, if not worldwide, acclaim and touched the lives of hundreds and hundreds of young men in his 57 years at Grambling. That will be his greatest legacy. — Grant Teaff

When I watch professional football, I love listening to John Madden because I know he knows what he's talking about. He's been both down in the trenches and in front of the bench as a coach. He knows the game. — Robert Kiyosaki

But we had a fantastic coach, Simon Clifford, who runs a British football youth game which teaches Brazilian techniques - which is what we wanted to incorporate into the film. And some of those things we eventually got in. — Parminder Nagra

Because of the booking I will miss the Holland game - if selected. — Paul Gascoigne

The Cowboy's defense has more holes in it than Ronny Milsapp and Jose Feliciano after a game of lawn darts. — Dennis Miller

I actually don't feel the years passing, although the younger players make sure to remind me of my age. If there's a clip of Bobby Charlton playing or a game's in black and white they'll ask: Were you playing in that Giggsy? — Ryan Giggs

Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper. — J.R. Moehringer

If in the earlier part of the century, middle-class children suffered from overattentive mothers, from being "mother's only accomplishment," today's children may suffer from an underestimation of their needs. Our idea of what a child needs in each case reflects what parents need. The child's needs are thus a cultural football in an economic and marital game. — Arlie Russell Hochschild

One of the more bizarre games I played as a kid was something called 'kill the man.' It was a cross between football and rugby, which found the person carrying the ball a target of some hungry tacklers. I still don't know why we enjoyed the game because it was impossible to win. — Chuck Todd

Football has very direct and strong connections to New Orleans. The game of football has served as a positive beacon in our city. It has given our citizens hope in tough, trying times. — Tom Benson

Through school, I saw plenty of theatre my parents weren't necessarily up on. They would prefer a football game to watching 'The Nutcracker,' and that's fine. I enjoy both. — Katori Hall

If you look at the world-class performers at the top of the game, their numbers are just exceptional and that is the level he is at. — Brendan Rodgers

My favorite football memory isn't beating Florida or winning the bowl game ... My favorite memories are of playing football with my brothers and my dad in the front yard when I was younger. — Eli Manning

There is a progression of understanding vis-a-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance
physical, emotional, intellectual and every other way. Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its 'national pastime' pedestal in less than fifteen years. — Hunter S. Thompson

It's the opening line of a football game returned for a touchdown. Or fumbled.

It's what orange juice is to breakfast, the first minutes of a blind date, a salesman's opening remarks.

It sets the tone, lights the stage, greases the skids for everything to follow.

It's the most important part of everything you'll ever write because if it doesn't work, whatever follows won't matter. It won't get read.

It's your opening paragraph. And enough can't be said about its importance.

Seduction. That's basically what leads are all about--enticing the reader across the threshold of your book, novel or article--because nothing happens until you get 'em inside.

And you literally have only seconds to do it because surveys show that eight out of ten people quit reading whatever it is they've started after the first fifty words. — Lionel Fisher

I played the game for 20 years, and I think that kept me on the football field, being adjusted. Getting hit so many times, being all out of whack, and going in to see my chiropractor kept me back on the football field. — Jerry Rice

I found the support inside Old Trafford has been terrific and, if there was ever a show of support for the football club and team, it was in this game. Inside Old Trafford it was terrific, it really was. — David Moyes

And none of you teenagers have cell phones?"
I wasn't sure what Addie's plan was, but I stepped forward to help her lie her way out of this one. I could tell she wasn't going to answer right. I pointed to all of us in turn, starting with Addie. "She got grounded from hers." Then to Duke. "His fell in the toilet yesterday." Then to Trevor. "His got stolen at a football game." And then pulled mine out. "And mine is out of batteries. — Kasie West

Marino was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005, and his name always comes up when the conversation centers on the greatest quarterbacks of all time. But his greatness comes with an asterisk: He never won the Big Game. — Don Yaeger

I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto. — Margaret Atwood