2008 National Football League Season
The 2008 NFL season was the 89th regular season of the National Football League, themed with the slogan “Believe in Now.”
Super Bowl XLIII, the league’s championship game, was at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida on February 1, 2009, with the Pittsburgh Steelers coming out victorious over the Arizona Cardinals 27–23 and winning their NFL-record sixth Vince Lombardi Trophy.
Conversely, the Detroit Lions became the first NFL team with a winless season since the strike-shortened 1982 NFL season, finishing their season 0-16. For the first time since the NFL expanded to the sixteen game season in 1978, three teams won two or fewer games: the Lions, the Kansas City Chiefs and the St. Louis Rams. Previously two teams won two or fewer games in 1979, 1981, 1985, 1992 and 2001.
The regular season began on September 4 with the defending Super Bowl champion New York Giants defeating the Washington Redskins 16–7, and concluded with the 2009 Pro Bowl on February 8, 2009 in Honolulu.
Read more about 2008 National Football League Season: Final Regular Season Standings, Playoffs, Rule Changes, Uniforms, Milestones, Regular Season Statistical Leaders
Famous quotes containing the words national, football, league and/or season:
“It is to be lamented that the principle of national has had very little nourishment in our country, and, instead, has given place to sectional or state partialities. What more promising method for remedying this defect than by uniting American women of every state and every section in a common effort for our whole country.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward the Light Brigade!”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“She, O, she is fallen
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again
And salt too little which may season give
To her foul tainted flesh!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)