Here is our collection of American football trivia — the origins, the oddities, the record breakers and the things you can win an argument with.

Origins and Early Days

  • The 1905 college season was so brutal that at least 18 players died from injuries sustained on the field, with well over a hundred more seriously hurt. President Theodore Roosevelt summoned representatives of Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House and pushed for reform.
  • The changes that followed in 1906 gave us much of the modern game: the forward pass was legalised, mass formations were outlawed, a neutral zone was created between the two lines, and the first down requirement was raised to 10 yards. The reform body set up at the time later became the NCAA.
  • The huddle is credited to Gallaudet University, the world's leading university for deaf and hard of hearing students. In the 1890s, quarterback Paul Hubbard grew concerned that opponents who also knew sign language could read his play calls, so he gathered his teammates into a tight circle to hide them. Gallaudet still calls itself the "Home of the Huddle".
  • The first Rose Bowl was played on 1 January 1902 at Tournament Park in Pasadena, California, where Michigan crushed Stanford 49-0. It was such a lopsided contest that organisers dropped football from the New Year's programme and ran chariot races instead until 1916. The game did not move to the Rose Bowl Stadium until 1923.
  • The Four Horsemen of Notre Dame — Jim Crowley, Elmer Layden, Don Miller and Harry Stuhldreher — were given their nickname by sportswriter Grantland Rice in 1924. They played together for the last time on 1 January 1925, beating Stanford 27-10 in the Rose Bowl.
  • The first NFL draft was held on 8 February 1936 at the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia. The Eagles used the very first pick on Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago, the inaugural Heisman Trophy winner — and he never played a down in the league, turning down the money on offer to work as a foam rubber salesman.
  • The first professional team to put an insignia on their helmets was the Los Angeles Rams in 1948, when halfback Fred Gehrke, a trained artist, hand painted yellow horns onto the team's blue leather helmets. Every other team eventually followed.

Footballer Image

Breaking Barriers

  • Charles Follis is recognised as the first Black professional football player, paid to play for the Shelby Athletic Club in Ohio from 1904.
  • Fritz Pollard became the NFL's first Black head coach in 1921, with the Akron Pros. It would be 68 years before another Black head coach was hired in the modern era, when Art Shell took over the Raiders in 1989.
  • The NFL was effectively segregated from 1934 to 1945. The colour barrier was broken again in 1946 by four men: Kenny Washington and Woody Strode signed with the Los Angeles Rams, while Marion Motley and Bill Willis joined the Cleveland Browns of the rival AAFC. All four did so a year before Jackie Robinson's debut in Major League Baseball.
  • Doug Williams became the first Black quarterback to start a Super Bowl, and he won it, leading Washington past Denver in Super Bowl XXII and taking the MVP award.

The Super Bowl

  • The first Super Bowl was played on 15 January 1967, with the Green Bay Packers of the NFL defeating the Kansas City Chiefs of the AFL 35-10.
  • It remains the only Super Bowl broadcast simultaneously by two networks. CBS held the NFL rights and NBC the AFL rights, so both carried the game — and no complete network recording of that broadcast is known to survive in the hands of the NFL or either network.
  • The two leagues could not even agree on a ball. Green Bay used the NFL's Wilson, Kansas City used the AFL's slightly longer, narrower Spalding, and each team played with its own ball when it had possession.
  • The second half of Super Bowl I had to be kicked off twice, because NBC was still in a commercial break when the first kick went up.
  • The name is said to have come from Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt, who was watching his children play with a Super Ball toy.
  • The Vince Lombardi Trophy is awarded to the winners of the Super Bowl. It has been made by Tiffany & Co. since the beginning, stands 22 inches tall in sterling silver, weighs about seven pounds, and takes roughly four months and 72 hours of hand labour to produce. Originally the World Championship Game Trophy, it was renamed after Lombardi's death in 1970 and first presented under his name in 1971.
  • Super Bowl LX, on 8 February 2026 at Levi's Stadium, went to the Seattle Seahawks, who beat the New England Patriots 29-13. Running back Kenneth Walker III took the MVP award, the first running back to do so since Terrell Davis in 1997.
  • That defeat left New England as the first franchise to lose six Super Bowls — from a record 12 appearances.
  • Tom Brady has won more Super Bowls than any franchise: seven rings from 10 appearances.

Records and Feats

  • Jerry Rice's career receiving numbers still look like typing errors: 1,549 receptions, 22,895 receiving yards and 197 touchdown catches, plus 208 total touchdowns.
  • The longest field goal in NFL regular season history is 68 yards, kicked by Jacksonville's Cam Little against the Raiders in November 2025 — and he owns the second longest as well, a 67 yarder from earlier the same season. He also made a 70 yarder in preseason, which does not count for the record books.
  • Tom Dempsey's famous 63 yard kick in 1970 stood as the outright record for 43 years, and he made it with a specially built shoe on a foot born without toes.
  • The Ice Bowl, the NFL Championship Game of 31 December 1967, was played at Lambeau Field at 13 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, falling to 18 below by the finish. Green Bay beat Dallas 21-17 on a Bart Starr quarterback sneak with 16 seconds left, the field's underground heating system having failed. The referee's metal whistle famously froze to his lips.

The Ball, the Broadcast and Other Oddities

  • A football is not made of pigskin and never has been in the modern era — the leather comes from cowhide. The nickname is a leftover from the inflated animal bladders used in the game's distant ancestors.
  • Every leather football the NFL uses is made by hand in the small town of Ada, Ohio. Wilson has been the official ball of the NFL since 1941 and has made them in Ada since 1955, turning out more than half a million leather footballs a year with a workforce of around 120 craftspeople.
  • The first instant replay was used during the Army-Navy game at Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia on 7 December 1963, the idea of CBS director Tony Verna. Viewers were so confused that announcer Lindsey Nelson had to tell them Army had not scored again.
  • A study of NFL broadcasts found that a game lasting more than three hours contains only about 11 minutes of actual ball-in-play action. Considerably more airtime goes to replays, huddles and advertising.
  • The Green Bay Packers are the only major American professional sports team owned by its fans. A non-profit corporation since 1923, the club has around 5.2 million shares held by roughly 539,000 shareholders across six stock sales. The shares pay no dividend, cannot be resold at a profit, and no individual may hold more than 200,000 of them.