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

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

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

Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings. – George F. Will