Fun Football Trivia & Facts: The Weird, Wild, and Record-Breaking
You never know when that Wednesday night trivia at your local outing is going to call for some obscure football answers. When that call does come, hopefully some of these quick facts and trivia will give you answers. Between football history, weird football rules, and just interesting football facts, there’s much more to the game you watch besides scoring points, tackling, winning, and losing.
Football expands into the environments in which teams play in and how they can truly call for “home field advantage.” It includes the rarities of never-called penalties that are stashed away in the official rule book just in case. It’s also about the plays that you’ll see once in a blue moon that make you pause, look around and say, “What was that?” Here are some surprising football facts that dive deeper than a box score.
Professional Football’s First Steps
Before the National Football League (NFL) planted its roots in 1920, the first-ever form of an official football game came 51 years prior on November 8, 1869. It was then that two schools from New Jersey—Rutgers and New Jersey (this would become Princeton)—played a game in northern Jersey, New Brunswick specifically, to the tune of a 6-4 Rutgers win in front of about 100 spectators.
The game was incredibly different. Each team had 25 players that weren’t allowed to carry or throw the ball. Instead, the game was taken almost literally in its name, “football.” The objective of the game was to kick the ball through the opposing team’s goal. The only way you could move the ball was by batting it with your hands, feet, or head. Also, you might think that the score of 6-4 means it was a low-scoring affair. Not necessarily. Instead, the teams played 10 total games, and each game would end once a team scored a single goal. Think of it as a game within a game, almost like what you see in tennis with games, sets, and matches.
NFL Stadium & Crowd Facts
Home field advantage is a real thing in football, and there’s a few places in the league that set literal records for it. In a Week 4 game on a Monday night, Kansas City fans reached world-record numbers of loud. In the first quarter, Arrowhead Stadium’s noise level hit 142.2 decibels. That’s higher than the sound of a 747 jet engine at takeoff.
Another city that’s familiar with loud environments? Seattle. Known around the league as “12’s,” fans of the team have set the world record for loudest crowd noise at an outdoor sporting event twice—both in the same season. On September 15, 2013, the stadium reached 136.6 decibels. Less than three months later, on December 2, they reached 137.6 decibels.
Largest Crowds in American Football History
There’s nothing like supporting your team alongside 156,989 other fans in a single stadium. That’s what the “Battle at Bristol” was between the University of Tennessee and Virginia Tech on September 10, 2016. The game was played at Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tennessee, earning a Guiness World Record for the largest audience ever to attend an American football game.
When it comes to professional American football, that record for a regular season game belongs to 105,121 fans at the inaugural game in Dallas’ newest stadium on September 20, 2009.
Rare Plays, Penalties, & Stats
Ever hear of the fair catch kick? Usually when a team fields a fair catch, they’ll start a fresh possession of four downs. What some don’t know, though, is that teams have the option to attempt a fair catch kick after the play, meaning they can go for a field goal—out of the “free kick” position. This means the kicking team lines up in a kickoff-like manner. The last time this happened successfully was in December of 2024. Before that? 1976.
How about the dropkick? It’s like a punt, just a little bit more active. A kicker can use this method for field goals, extra points, or just a regular punt. Instead of kicking the ball straight-up, you’ll instead intentionally drop the ball in front of you, letting it bounce once, and then kicking it off that bounce. This action is inspired by rugby, and the last successful dropkick for points in the NFL was on New Year’s Day in 2006 on an extra point attempt. Before that, the last successful dropkick was in 1941 on an extra point, too.
Arguably the rarest penalty in all of football, mainly because it’s never been called, is the Palpably Unfair Act. This, according to the NFL rulebook, is when “the Referee, after consulting the officiating crew, enforces any such distance penalty as they consider equitable and irrespective of any other specified code penalty. The Referee may award a score.” That’s right. The officiating crew can award a team a score if they deem it necessary, and the offending player may be disqualified as well. The closest this came to being called recently was in a playoff game in January of 2025.
There’s rare, then there’s things that’ve never been done. Take “Scorigami” for example. A concept created by Jon Bois of SB Nation, Scorigami highlights the rarities of professional American football scores and welcomes the scores that’ve never been recorded—until they are. By using Scorigami, you can see the most frequent game-ending scores in league history. There’ve been games that’ve ended in 0-0 ties, as well as games that’ve ended with a score of 72-41.
First Televised Professional Football Game
Nowadays, tuning into a football game is filled with dozens of camera angles, replays, commercials, commentary, and more. Turn the clock back to 1939 when the first televised professional football game was shown. They used just two cameras, eight staffers, and as the game went on throughout the night and the sun went down, the broadcast had to revert to a radio broadcast since you couldn’t see the field at all. According to the NFL, that broadcast was shown to “roughly 1,000 TV sets in New York City at the time.” To put things into perspective, an estimated 127.7 million people watched Super Bowl LIX in February of 2025.
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