Word.ws English Dictionary

pull the football

pull the football verb: to appear to make someone a promising offer, only to withdraw it to the detriment of the other party.

Verb

pull the football (third-person singular simple present pulls the football, present participle pulling the football, simple past and past participle pulled the football)

  1. (US, colloquial) To appear to make someone a promising offer, only to withdraw it to the detriment of the other party.
    • [see title]2013 February 10, Shea-Taylor, quotee, “Pulling the football on the push for gay rights”, in The Sun Chronicle
    • Instead, they took the deportation and pulled the football away on doing anything to keep immigrants in this nation.2022, Erik Loomis, “Review: Latin America and the Radical Left: Reconsidering Transnational Solidarity”, in New Labor Forum, volume 29, number 2, pages 109-112

Forms of pull the football

third-person singular presentpulls the football
present participlepulling the football
past participlepulled the football
pastpulled the football
alternative formpull the football away
alternative formyank the football

Origin of pull the football

From a running gag in the American comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz. Typically, Lucy Van Pelt holds a football for Charlie Brown to kick, only to pull it away and cause him to fall over. The gag first appeared in the November 14, 1951 comic.

Questions about pull the football

What does pull the football mean?
Pull the football means to appear to make someone a promising offer, only to withdraw it to the detriment of the other party.
What part of speech is pull the football?
Pull the football is a verb.
What is the past tense of pull the football?
The past tense of pull the football is pulled the football.

Words near pull the football in the dictionary

  1. pull strings
  2. pull teeth
  3. pull the devil by the tail
  4. pull the fat out of the fire
  5. pull the fire alarm
  6. pull the football
  7. pull the ladder up after oneself
  8. pull the ladder up behind oneself
  9. pull the long bow
  10. pull the other leg
  11. pull the other one

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pull the football (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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