Top 55 Professional Football Quotes

For almost 15 years, professional football is about yourself: How can I improve? How can I make myself better? Before winning a game was the short-term reward that meant everything. Now, I can look at the bigger picture.

When I watch professional football, I love listening to John Madden because I know he knows what he’s talking about. He’s been both down in the trenches and in front of the bench as a coach. He knows the game.

I competed every day as a professional football player… You’ve got to like competing. That’s how your team gets better, when you have competition every day.

I used to tell the players that professional football is a part-time profession. I used to tell them it gets you ready for your life’s work.

I don’t think there’s any question that the UFL or any other league that wants to challenge the NFL can have an impact. The demand for professional football is off the charts.

My mum was always more pushing me towards the academic side; she wasn’t really interested in me having a professional football career.

Surely, sport is not fundamentally about the safety of athletes. If it were, we’d probably have to ban professional football, right after boxing.

Only a handful of professional football athletes have had a signature shoe, unlike in basketball where there have been a number of guys.

Since I was five or six years old, I just wanted to be a professional football player. I wanted to play against the best players. I wanted to play in big stadiums in front of big crowds, and I was desperate to play for my country one day, and thankfully, I was lucky enough that happened.

The only thing I ever wanted to be was a professional football player.

It’s hard to play quarterback in professional football.

I don’t even enjoy football, at least professional football, anymore because I’m breaking the game down constantly. You’re sitting there watching the plays, and you’re talking mental reps on what would I have done here against this coverage or this leverage, this, that. It is what it is.

It is wonderful… Steve and Dan took professional football to a whole different level with the way they played the game. The fact that Steve is going in with Dan is very special.

When I first got to college, in my mind, I was going to end up playing professional football. When I tell people this story, they always end up laughing, and I chuckle about it at my own expense. I was a big fan of American football; I played in high school, and I ended up earning the opportunity to play in college.

Playing professional football is something I’ll never be able to do.

Coming from losing my dream of playing professional football, not having a college degree at the time and looking to jump into the business world at a young age was pretty daunting for me.

You have to remember that professional football is a job, too, and some people have to get results on the pitch to pay to live.

I’m not sure I will watch a lot of professional football once I’ve retired.

To have six years of professional football under my belt already is really something.

I’d like to run a professional football team. I’d love to run the USTA, be the sports editor of the ‘New York Times.’

One of the great things about being a professional football player is visiting countries and seeing cultures you might never see.

It’s none of our business, the sexual preference of people. So, I hope if someone’s thinking about it, that if they do come out as gay and are a professional football player, and it makes them happy, and it makes their life easier, then I think they should do it.

I can confirm that following specialist medical advice I am having to retire from playing professional football.

You know how much money I could have made playing professional football as a tight end? But I can’t jump, and I can’t run fast. That was my problem.

I would try to be a striker even though I wasn’t and once I started growing up and seeing professional football was a step closer I would look at Sergio Ramos. I always looked up to Ramos as an example and watched him a lot.

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

Since I was in high school, I wanted to play professional football and professional baseball, be a two-sport star.

My dad excelled at so many sports in his life. Everything from professional football to being a world-class shot putter, but nothing meant as much to my dad as what he accomplished in the ring as a WWE Superstar.

Certainly, our work has identified CTE in many professional football players, but we’re also seeing it in a very high percentage of college players.

I think the greatest all-around athlete ever was Jim Brown. He played lacrosse, basketball and ran track at Syracuse. He played professional football for the Browns.

I always wanted to become a good role model for kids as a professional football player. Unfortunately, I didn’t attain that through football, but I was smart enough to realize that professional wrestling provided another opportunity for that.

I played 13 years. I did quite well in professional football. Therefore, I do not need.

I don’t say I’m necessarily a professional football player. I’m a competitor. That’s what was instilled in me as a young boy.

In ‘Dragon Ball,’ the characters have a challenge. They know they have to push their bodies to the limit in their training so they can make sure to defeat their opponent, much like professional football players.

I got my first taste of real professional football on loan at Northampton. I was 18 at the time, and I played only nine games, but it was a massive opportunity for me.

I always watched professional football and my father played at an amateur level, but I didn’t think I wanted to become a pro.

If you want to become a professional football player at any level, when you’re growing up, you have to make sacrifices, and it’s very difficult. It’s not easy, but you have to train hard, you have to live right, and you have to rest.

As a professional football player, I have known perfectly well from the day I started playing that every day I have to fight for my place.

I needed to learn to be a coach initially. I think if I’d gone into professional football when I stopped playing when I was 30 years old I’d have failed because I’d have made too many mistakes because I had no real idea at that time.

I was a young boy from Western Australia with a dream to play professional football.

I was fighting a war on two fronts. I was fighting the best defenses in professional football and I was fighting the media. At that level you just cannot do that. You just cannot do it. I couldn’t stop it, and I didn’t try to stop it.

Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn’t do this out of compassion or guilt. It’s done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.

The only thing I’ve ever wanted to do is play professional football, and be a professional quarterback, so now that it’s here and it’s getting close, it’s just kind of making all that pain and suffering and waiting and working hard worth it.

My failures were something for me – my first contact with professional football. Though it didn’t go all that well, it’s not a regret, it’s just like that. But looking back, those failures helped me consider football differently, consider the professional game differently.

I’ve always believed since I was a kid that God was gonna allow me to play professional football, to use it as a platform to proclaim and live out the name of Jesus. And, you know, that’s the most exciting part about my life because God has done things in me to change my character to benefit the kingdom.

In professional football, there are always going to be critics.

Aston Villa and Middlesbrough, they showed me what is English football. It’s tough, it’s difficult and they showed me how life is like in professional football.

The most important aspect of my signing with the WFL was not to demean or undermine the National Football League, but rather to make professional football a form of employment where management recognizes its workers as individuals capable of communicating on an intelligent level.

I think, a lot of guys who want to be professional football players, they see the Premiership players, and they see the finished article, but there’s a lot of hard work that’s gone into their careers for them to get there. There’s a lot of sacrifice, and I think people tend to forget that.

I don’t think my experience with professional football has been what you’d call normal but I don’t regret it.

Al Davis has been the biggest influence in my professional football life. I mean, he was a guy that gave me an opportunity, one, to get into professional football in 1967 as an assistant coach, and then at the age of 32, giving me the opportunity to be the head coach.

On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner’s office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player.