Imagine, thirty years from now people will be talking about that Super Bowl or this Super Bowl. I mean, if people thirty years from now even know what football is. – Robert John Kuechenberg, 1983

…trying to maintain order during a legalized gang brawl involving 80 toughs with a little whistle, a hanky and a ton of prayer. – A veteran NFL referee describing his duties, quoted in Richard Saul Wurman, Amer

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, Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback, 1965

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