Top 60 Steve Young Quotes

It’s so exhausting in the pocket taking shots when you know I can go. I don’t want to take that shot and maybe make a bigger play. To dedicate and discipline your mind that ‘I have to find a way, that’s the only way I can learn… ‘ That’s the challenge.

To play 18 years as a pro and have a great college career, it’s awesome.

Football, no one wants to ram into people. It’s not human nature. You have to have a lot of incentive to ram into somebody to benefit others.

The pistol isn’t going to go away, but the job in the long run is going to be to deliver the ball from the pocket.

I’m a positive person.

I can hit the whiskers on a cat with a football from a distance of forty yards.

Donovan McNabb has great, fast feet and has learned to lock them in to run the Eagles’ offense effectively.

I got good grades. I played sports.

At the time I retired I was kind of known for it, as one of the guys whose career ended technically as a result of a big hit.

When fans showed up at Candlestick, there was a great sense of anticipation that they would watch not only winning football, but also artistry. Our offense was that sublime.

BYU I think had a philosophy of nameless, faceless athletes for the greater good of BYU which is fine. We all did our thing and we’re grateful for it.

There’s a negative effect when you run around without exhausting everything that happens with the play call.

If you’re playing for 10 or 15 years, you can’t every week run six option plays. It can be around. It can be a part of the game, but sooner or later you’ve got to deliver the ball from the pocket. That’s the game. Now, if the game changes, and it’s proven a championship can be won from the pistol spread, then I’m wrong.

Over time, I learned that how a quarterback moves the chains and leads his team to touchdowns is about as important as whether he actually does it or not.

I’ve played more golf with Joe Montana and Steve Bono than I’ve played with anyone else. We’ve played a ton of golf. I always tell people; my relationship with Joe was as good as it could be.

I think Tom Coughlin is an amazing motivator. When you look at his personality, you say, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ But there’s some ability he has to laser-focus a football team when it’s most important. He seems to be a real valuable asset, kind of Knute Rocke almost.

A lot of what you get done in the NFL is by perception. They perceive you as really talented, and they worry about you. You’ve got to come out of the locker room with something.

While it’s great for a quarterback to have athletic ability, his goal is to get the ball out of his hand, orchestrate the offense and not allow his ability to stand in the way of the offense running efficiently.

My biggest problem when I was younger was trying to balance my ability with what the team needed me to do to officially run the offense.

Scrambling, when no one’s around, getting down, getting out of bounds, taking a glancing blow, those are all fine. You can do that all day long.

If quarterbacks learned the West Coast offense in college, oh man – it would make a huge difference.

You become a leader in times of trouble. Leaders emerge when things don’t go well. When everyone else starts pointing fingers, a leader takes responsibility.

The truth is that in the NFL, the job is to deliver the ball from the pocket. That’s the job.

I never asked to be the highest paid player in sports.

I loved the expectation that every year we were going to the Super Bowl.

Most people have an off switch and they choose when to go all out.

As the story about CTE got more real, it became more clear that players are playing that without a full understanding of the risks they face, and the long-term effects.

Golf is one of those games that I want my kids to know and learn so that they can play it all of their lives.

I’m willing to share my experiences with any young quarterback.

Most veterans detested training camp, but not me. I loved having a dorm room and a little fridge with snacks, and I looked forward to goofing around in the meetings.

I can’t imagine as a rookie actually playing good football. I went through it.

Call me a quarterback, not a running quarterback.

The demands of excellent NFL quarterbacking I always said took every piece of me, emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually. It was like it just took it all, and I think that was what was so energizing about it and unreplicable.

Bill Walsh was a genius in many ways.

Golf is important to me. I love the game.

Private equity is a science project for many, many years, and when you have a science project, it leaves the human beings as a secondary fact.

I am the recipient of the best coaching that one person has ever had.

My favorite player I ever played was Reggie White. He played so ferociously. What I loved about playing against him was the millisecond you went down, he became your friend and would ask, ‘How’s your family?’ In a way that could feel weird and awkward.

If sports has anything to do for society, football plays a great role.

I have a photographic memory that enables me to visualize what everyone in the huddle is supposed to do on each of the hundreds of plays in our playbook.

I always say football is very unnatural sport. Nobody loves to just ram into people.

Obviously, I love the idea of athletic quarterbacks.

In 2010, my kids came home telling these ridiculous stories about me they heard from school. I realized my kids didn’t know my story, and they were hearing it from the goofballs at school.

When it’s all over I might be able to say I’ve had the strangest career in pro football history.

You can be an astronaut, knowing it can be super dangerous but understand intuitively what the risk issues are. Not having the same usable knowledge about the risk of football, or any line of work, doesn’t work.

I think when you look at the quarterback position, and this mastery of the craft we talk about, it really is an advanced degree. It’s like going to med school, or law school, or getting your PH.D. It really is that type of educational effort, on the field and off the field.

I went to law school.

So the truth is, if there’s a lesson to be learned from mobile quarterbacks, it is deliver the ball from the pocket, which demands mastery of the data that is involved working in the pocket, which is, ‘I know everything about everything.’

I played 18 seasons. That’s a lot. There is some that played more. Brett Favre I think played a couple more. There is a few. There is a few guys that played more, but not many.

When you play quarterback in San Francisco, not much goes under the radar.

I don’t want to look like I’m money-hungry.

You have to take certain truths. One truth is that to have championship success in the NFL you have to learn to deliver the ball from the pocket.

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

Third and 10 down by four at Lambeau Field in the drizzling rain… two minutes left. There’s nothing like that.

Perception is reality.

You don’t know the demons people deal with, and you just have no idea.

Most young quarterbacks are on the field because their team stinks.

As a kid, I was fearless during the day. But at nighttime, I needed to be home.

My wife hates football, and my kids don’t really care.

Some of the great John Wayne hero things that have ever happened in football happened because people play hurt.