In honor of Sunday night football, a quote from Hunter S. Thompson on the hardest-hitting football game I've ever seen: the 2002 Sunday night match-up between the two best teams in the NFL at that point in the season, the Denver Broncos and the Miami Dolphins.
From Hunter S. Thompson's Hey Rube, 2004:
The quality of football we see today is no doubt better than ever. The players are bigger, faster, and enormously richer. There are three or four current teams in the NFL that would have visibly intimidated the best teams of yesteryear, including the '85 49ers and the '68 Packers.
Either one of the teams in that bloodcurdling Sunday night game would run away from those sluggards who ruled their roost in the old days. The Dolphins and the Broncos played a genuinely brutal football game that both teams lost. Denver lost on the scoreboard and Miami lost its quarterback, all for a silly little "W" on their record. Both were once-beaten coming in, and now---after inflicting many crippling wounds on each other in public for three ball-busting hours---both Miami and Denver are structurally weaker than they were on Sunday morning....What is a bloody two-point victory worth, if it costs you your starting quarterback and your strong safety for the rest of the season?
The Broncos are better off in defeat than the Dolphins are in victory---which is a dismal thing to say about the two best teams in the league at this stage of the season, but it's true. That Sunday night game was qualitatively hurtful on both sides and opened the Super Bowl up, once again, to some squirrelly team like New England or New Orleans.
Tags: Hunter S. Thompson
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