The Super Bowl has become more of a staging event for a week of debauchery than a contest to determine the best team in the National Football League. – Peter H. King, San Francisco Examiner, 1980

One of the great disappointments of a football game is that the cheerleaders never seem to get injured. – New York Tribune

I quickly learned what many Sunday widows already realized — that football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbal, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time. – Arnold J. Mandell, “A Psychiatric Study of Professional Football,” 1974 [An inte

My idea of a good hit is when the victim wakes up on the sidelines with train whistles blowing in his head… I like to believe that my best hits border on felonious assault. – Jack Tatum, They Call Me Assassin, 1979