Losing the Super Bowl is worse than death. You have to get up the next morning. – George Allen, quoted in J. Mitchell Perry & Steve Jamison, In the Zone: Achi

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

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

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theatres, etc., that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness and jazz bands. – George Santayana, letter to Van Wyck Brooks, 1927