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

Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors. – Frank Gifford, quoted in Sports Illustrated, 1960 July 4th

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

…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