Good motivational football quotes can inspire a team. They can move a fan base. They can create a rallying cry.
We’ve assembled some of the best for you to use with your football squad.
Top Motivational Football Quotes
Here are some motivating and inspiring football quotes from some of the best college coaches.
Bear Bryant Quotes
You will never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load.
If anything 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.
Never quit. It is the easiest cop-out in the world. Set a goal, and don’t quit until you attain it. When you do attain it, set another goal, and don’t quit until you reach it. Never quit.
There are a lot of blood, sweat, and guts between dreams and success.
I think the most important thing of all for any team is a winning attitude. The coaches must have it. The players must have it – The student body must have it. If you have dedicated players who believe in themselves, you don’t need a lot of talent.
Bear Bryant Quotations
If a man is a quitter, I’d rather find out in practice than in a game. I ask for all a player has, so I’ll know later what I can expect.
The idea of molding men means a lot to me.
You must learn how to hold a team together. You must lift some men up, calm others down until finally, they’ve got one heartbeat. Then you’ve got yourself a team.
If wanting to win is a fault, as some of my critics seem to insist, then I plead guilty. I like to win. I know no other way. It’s in my blood.
I’m no miracle man. I guarantee nothing but hard work.
I know what it takes to win. If I can sell them on what it takes to win, then we are not going to lose too many football games.
Losing doesn’t make me want to quit. It makes me want to fight that much harder.
It’s not the will to win that matters – everyone has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that matters.
If you believe in yourself and have dedication and pride – and never quit – you’ll be a winner. The price of victory is high, but so are the rewards.
Get the winners into the game.
Set goals – high goals for you and your organization. When your organization has a goal to shoot for, you create teamwork, people working for a common good.
The old lessons (work, self-discipline, sacrifice, teamwork, fighting to achieve) aren’t being taught by many people other than football coaches these days. The football coach has a captive audience and can teach these lessons because the communication lines between himself and his players are more wide open than between kids and parents. We better teach these lessons, or else the country’s future population will be made up of a majority of crooks, drug addicts, or people on relief.
The Bear
Sacrifice. Work. Self-discipline. I teach these things, and my boys don’t forget them when they leave.
Show class, have pride and display character. If you do, winning takes care of itself.
I’ll never give up on a player regardless of his ability as long as he never gives up on himself. In time he will develop.
Alabama Great Bear Bryant Sayings
Don’t give up at halftime. Concentrate on winning the second half.
Don’t talk too much. Don’t pop off – Don’t talk after the game until you cool off.”
Mama wanted me to be a preacher. I told her coachin’, and preachin’ were a lot alike.
It’s awfully important to win with humility. It’s also important to lose. I hate to lose worse than anyone, but if you never lose, you won’t know how to act. If you lose with humility, then you can come back.
In life, you’ll have your back up against the wall many times. You might as well get used to it.
The biggest mistake coaches make taking borderline cases and trying to save them. I’m not talking about grades now. I’m talking about character. I want to know before a boy enrolls about his home life and what his parents want him to be.
There is no sin in not liking to play; it’s a mistake for a boy to be there if he doesn’t want to.
In a crisis, don’t hide behind anything or anybody. They’re going to find you anyway.
Be aware of “yes” men. Generally, they are losers. Surround yourself with winners. Never forget – people win.
Bama Football
If there is one thing that has helped me as a coach, it’s my ability to recognize winners or good people who can become winners by paying the price.
You take those little rascals, talk to them good, pat them on the back, let them think they are good, and they will go out and beat the biguns.
If you whoop and holler all the time, the players just get used to it.
If you want to coach, you have three rules to follow to win. One, surround yourself with people who can’t live without football. I’ve had a lot of them. Two, be able to recognize winners. They come in all forms. And, three, have a plan for everything. A plan for practice, a plan for the game. A plan for being ahead, and a plan for being behind 20-0 at the half, with your quarterback hurt and the phones dead, with it raining cats and dogs and no rain gear because the equipment man left it at home.
Best Motivational Football Quotations
My approach to the game has been the same at all the places I’ve been. Vanilla. The sure way. That means, first of all, to win physically. If you got eleven on a field, and they beat the other eleven physically, they’ll win. They will start forcing mistakes. They’ll win in the fourth quarter.
What are you doing here? Tell me why you are here. If you are not here to win a national championship, you’re in the wrong place. You, boys, are special. I don’t want my players to be like other students. I want special people. You can learn a lot on the football field that isn’t taught in the home, the church, or the classroom. There are going to be days when you think you’ve got no more to give, and then you’re going to give plenty more. You are going to have pride and class. You are going to be very special – You are going to win the national championship for Alabama.
If you want to walk the heavenly streets of gold, you gotta know the password, “Roll, Tide, Roll!”
Little things make the difference. Everyone is well prepared in the big things, but only the winners perfect the little things.
The first time you quit, it’s hard. The second time, it gets easier – The third time, you don’t even have to think about it.
But there’s one thing about quitters you have to guard against – they are contagious. If one boy goes, the chances are he’ll take somebody with him, and you don’t want that. So when they would start acting that way, I used to pack them up and get them out, or embarrass them, or do something to turn them around.
On Coaching
Scout yourself. Have a buddy who coaches scout you.
People who are in it for their own good are individualists. They don’t share the same heartbeat that makes a team so great. A great unit, whether it be football or any organization, shares the same heartbeat.
I told them my system was based on the “ant plan” that I’d gotten the idea of watching a colony of ants in Africa during the war. A whole bunch of ants working toward a common goal.
There’s a lot of blood, sweat, and guts between dreams and success.
We can’t have two standards, one set for dedicated young men who want to do something ambitious and one set for those who don’t.
When you make a mistake, there are only three things you should ever do about it: 1. Admit it. 2. Learn from it, and 3. Don’t repeat it.
I honestly believe that if you are willing to out-condition the opponent, have confidence in your ability, be more aggressive than your opponent and have a genuine desire for team victory, you will become the national champions. If you have all the above, you will acquire confidence and poise, and you will have those intangibles that win the close ones.
Don’t ever give up on your ability. Don’t give up on a player who has it.
A good, quick, small team can beat a big, slow team at any time.
On Teaching
I have always tried to teach my players to be fighters. When I say that, I don’t mean put up your dukes and get in a fistfight over something. I’m talking about facing adversity in your life. There is not a person alive who isn’t going to have some awfully bad days in their lives. I tell my players that what I mean by fighting is when your house burns down, and your wife runs off with the drummer, and you’ve lost your job, and all the odds are against you. What are you going to do? Most people just lay down and quit. Well, I want my people to fight back.
I always want my players to show class, knock’em down, pat on the back, and run back to the huddle.
I’ll put you through hell, but in the end, we’ll all be champions.
I tell young players who want to be coaches, who think they can put up with all the headaches and heartaches, can you live without it? If you can live without it, don’t get into it.
Losing doesn’t make me want to quit. It makes me want to fight that much harder.
It’s not the will to win that matters – everyone has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that matters.
If they don’t have a winning attitude, I don’t want them.
I have tried to teach them to show class, to have pride, and to display character. I think football, winning games, take care of itself if you do that.
There is no substitute for guts.
Nick Saban Quotes
There’s no continuum for success. Focus on the progress, not the results.
Mediocre people don’t like high achievers, and high achievers don’t like mediocre people.
Our goal is to work against things we have not seen that we will see in the near future.
Do what you do and be who you are.
The good is enough attitude is not what we’re looking for. We have got to use every opportunity to improve individually so we can improve collectively.
Bobby Bowden Quotes
A better ending could not have been scripted. Of course, if we had won, that would have been better.
Discipline to me is sacrifice; it’s a willingness to give up something you want to do, so you can better yourself.
If short hair and good manners won football games, Army and Navy would play for the national championship every year.
Somehow, I went from being too young to being too old. Somewhere in there, I must have been just right.
I am not happy with moral victories. Those things are forgotten.
I’ve always said it takes more courage to stand back there and throw a ball, knowing you’re fixing to get drilled than anything I can think of in football.
I learned a long time ago that you don’t have to go around using bad language and trying to hurt people to show how macho you are. That stuff won’t get you anywhere. It just shows a lack of vocabulary and character.
The greatest mistake is to continue to practice a mistake.
He died right after he retired, and seeing that made me feel more conscious of a man needing a motive to live. If I ever got out of coaching, I would have to get a job somewhere, or I’m afraid I’d wilt on the vine, too.
I guess I’ll retire someday if I live that long.
Coaching Insights
He who gets the best players usually wins.
After you retire, there’s only one big event left.
Don’t go to the grave with life unused.
There are only about 6 inches that turn that halo into a noose.
To have the kind of year you want to have, something has to happen that you can’t explain why it happened.
Something has to happen that you can’t coach.
If somebody mistreats you, treat ’em good. That kills ’em.
He doesn’t know the meaning of the word fear, but then again, he doesn’t know the meaning of most words.
Son, you’ve got a good engine, but your hands aren’t on the steering wheel.