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

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

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