Football Sayings, Quotes and Slogans

Famous football sayings and quotes:

Most football players are temperamental. That’s 90 percent temper and 10 percent mental.
~Doug Plank

Let’s face it, you have to have a slightly recessive gene that has a little something to do with the brain to go out on the football field and beat your head against other human beings on a daily basis.
~Tim Green

Football doesn’t build character, it reveals character!
~Marv Levy

You have to play this game like somebody just hit your mother with a two-by-four.
~Dan Birdwell

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

The function of football, soccer, basketball and other passion-sports in modern industrial society is the transference of boredom, frustration, anger and rage into socially acceptable forms of combat. A temporary substitute for war; for nationalism; identification with something bigger than the self.
~Edward Abbey

Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors. 
~Frank Gifford

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.
~Erma Bombeck

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
~Erma Bombeck

If you’re mad at your kid, you can either raise him to be a nose tackle or send him out to play on the freeway. It’s about the same.
~Bob Golic

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

God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach.
~Heywood Broun

Football is all very well a good game for rough girls, but not for delicate boys.
~Oscar Wilde

If any thing goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you.
~Paul Bear Bryant

When I played pro football, I never set out to hurt anyone deliberately – unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.
~Dick Butkus

Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.
~Dave Barry

American football makes rugby look like a Tupperware party.
~Sue Lawley

Football is not a contact sport. It’s a collision sport. Dancing is a good example of a contact sport.
~Duffy Daugherty

When I went to Catholic high school in Philadelphia, we just had one coach for football and basketball. He took all of us who turned out and had us run through a forest. The ones who ran into the trees were on the football team.
~George Raveling football saying

The reason women don’t play football is because eleven of them would never wear the same outfit in public.
~Phyllis Diller

Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become.
~Mary McGrory

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

You need to play with supreme confidence, or else you’ll lose again, and then losing becomes a habit.
~Joe Paterno

A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.
~ Frank Leahy

Is there a point at which every Sunday during the NFL season ceases to make a man feel like a kid on Christmas morning?
~Mike Alexander

Football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbalized, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time.
~Arnold Mandell

I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me.
~Anna Quindlen

All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.
~Albert Camus

I give so much of myself on Sunday. I drain all the life out of myself out there. I get paid to play, to win, to give the city pride, so maybe everybody can forget for a little while how hard life is.
~Randall Cunningham

Violent ground-acquisition games such as football are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war.
~Robert Downey, Jr.

Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America’s sinfulness.
~George F. Will

As concerning football, I protest unto you that it may rather be called a friendly kind of fight than a play or recreation – a bloody and murdering practise than a fellowly sport or pastime.
~Philip Stubbes quotes

What’s the toughest thing in a professional football game? Well, it’s being the mother of the quarterback.
~John Madden

Sure, luck means a lot in football. Not having a good quarterback is bad luck.
~Don Shula

Football is an incredible game. Sometimes it’s so incredible, it’s unbelievable.
~Tom Landry

A professional football team warms up grimly and disparately, like an army on maneuvers: the ground troops here, the tanks there, the artillery and air force over there.
~Ted Solotaroff

If my mother put on a helmet and shoulder pads and a uniform that wasn’t the same as the one I was wearing, I would run over her if she was in my way, And I love my mother.
~ Bo Jackson

College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.
~Elbert Hubbard

Watching football is like watching pornography. There’s plenty of action, and I can’t take my eyes off it, but when it’s over, I wonder why the hell I spent an afternoon doing it.
~Luke Salisbury

The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I’ve ever seen that I didn’t have to clean.
~Erma Bombeck

Football linemen are motivated by a more complicated, self- determining series of factors than the simple fear of humiliation in the public gaze, which is the emotion that galvanizes the backs and receivers.
~Merlin Olsen quotes

I have seen women walk right past a TV set with a football game on and – this always amazes me – not stop to watch, even if the TV is showing replays of what we call a “good hit,” which is a tackle that causes at least one major internal organ to actually fly out of a player’s body.
~Dave Barry

I like to believe that my best hits border on felonious assault.
~Jack Tatum

Gentlemen, it is better to have died a small boy than to fumble this football.
~John Heisman

If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn’t be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.
~Irwin Shaw

It was an ideal day for football – too cold for the spectators and too cold for the players.
~Red Smith football saying

Football is mesmerizing, because it’s a figurative war. You go in one direction till you get there, but you get there as a team, not as an individual. Players bond whether they’re black or white, much as soldiers do.
~Oliver Stone

Football is easy if you’re crazy as hell.
~Bo Jackson

Football is a game played with arms, legs and shoulders but mostly from the neck up.
~Knute Rockne

Men are clinging to football on a level we aren’t even aware of. For centuries, we ruled everything, and now, in the last ten minutes, there are all these incursions by women. It’s our Alamo.
~Tony Kornheiser

Speed is not your fastest, but your slowest man. No back can run faster than his interference.
~Jock Sutherland

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
~George Santayana

Football Is an honest game. It’s true to life. It’s a game about sharing. Football is a team game. So is life.
~Joe Namath

When it comes to football, God is prejudiced – toward big, fast kids.
~Chuck Mills

Australian Rules football might best be described as a game devised for padded cells, played in the open air.
~Jim Murray

When it’s third and ten, you can take the milk drinkers and I’ll take the whiskey drinkers every time.
~Max McGee

College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.
~Henry Louis Mencken

The pride and presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries.
~Art Modell

Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.
~Merle Kessler

Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen. Soccer is a gentleman’s game played by beasts. Football is a beastly game played by beasts.
~Henry Blaha football saying

What about football? Is it a sport or a concussion?
~Jim Murray

The tactical difference between Association Football and Rugby with its varieties seems to be that in the former the ball is the missile, in the latter men are the missiles.
~Alfred E. Crawley

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.
~Eugene McCarthy

Famous Football Quotes and Sayings by American Presidents

Yes, even presidents of the United States love football. Here are just a few football sayings and quotes by some of the most well known Presidents.

We are inclined to think that if we watch a football game or a baseball game, we have taken part in it.
~John F. Kennedy

In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard.
~Theodore Roosevelt

Summing up my football career: I got into a few games after they were hopelessly won or hopelessly lost, you know, when they put the substitutes in, and finally the water boy, and then me. That is the way it worked.
~Richard Nixon

He’s a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off.
~Lyndon Baines Johnson

Famous Football Sayings by Vince Lombardi

The following football sayings and quotes are from the greatest football coach of all time, Vince Lombardi.

To play this game (football) you must have fire in you, and there is nothing that strokes fire like hate.
~Vince Lombardi

We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.
~Vince Lombardi

If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?
~Vince Lombardi

There is no room for second place. There is only one place in my game and that is first place. I have finished second twice in my time at Green Bay and I never want to finish second again.
~Vince Lombardi

We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.
~Vince Lombardi

Football is like life — it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.
~Vince Lombardi

Teamwork is what the Green Bay Packers were all about. They didn’t do it for individual glory. They did it because they loved one another.
~Vince Lombardi

People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.
~Vince Lombardi

It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.
~Vince Lombardi

If you can accept losing, you can’t win.
~Vince Lombardi

Coaches who can outline plays on a black board are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their player and motivate.
~Vince Lombardi

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.
~Vince Lombardi

Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you’re willing to pay the price.
~Vince Lombardi

Football Sayings and Slogans

Pain is temporary, pride is forever.

The price of victory is high, but so are the rewards

Only a few walk where we walk

Talk with your pads, play with your heart

Defense: Anticipate, Devastate, Dominate

Pain is temporary, pride is forever

If you can’t play nice, play football

Hustle, hit and never quit

Sweat makes the green grass grow

If you can’t take a hit, stay off the grass

Football is life…Get in the Game!

Football- It’s not a contact sport, it’s a collision sport

Hit Hard or Go home

Football is a team sport, so is life

Teamwork makes the dream work

The more I sweat in practice, the less I bleed in battle

If football is your religion, prepare to meet your maker

Champions are made, not born

When in doubt, punt!

Nothing but the pig skin

No Fantasy here, just football

Hit or be hit

Eat, sleep, play football

football; Play on grass NOT drugs.

If they don’t have football in heaven, I’m not going.