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

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

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