Chasing Van Brocklin: 500-yard passers in rare air, but his record remains
So shrouded in mystery is the NFL’s all-time single-game passing-yards mark — 554, by Norm Van Brocklin of the Los Angeles Rams in 1951 — that there are no physical relics from the game in question at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Canton is full of memorabilia and artifacts from many of the other significant moments in NFL lore, and anytime these days a new mark goes down another piece is added to display. But its best passing game has but a few known photographs representing a mark that miraculously has stood for more than 63 years.
The Pittsburgh Steelers’ Ben Roethlisberger made a gallant run at Van Brocklin this past Sunday, completing 40-of-49 passes (with a few clear drops) for 522 yards (tied for fourth-most all time), six touchdowns (a Steelers record) and no interceptions.
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The ball from the game will be headed to the Hall, and rightfully so — in doing so, Big Ben became the only man in league history to surpass the 500-yard mark twice, having previously torched the Green Bay Packers for 503 in 2009. Only 14 other quarterbacks have reached the plateau throughout the years, and Van Brocklin has remained on top since Harry Truman’s last term in office.
Sixteen 500-yard games in the 15,196 known games played in league history through Thursday night’s contest between the New Orleans Saints and Carolina Panthers.
It’s clearly a special plateau. But how special?
Roethlisberger seemed unfazed by the numbers. After the game, he said he had no idea during it that he was a few throws away from taking down one of the league’s most vaunted records.
“No. I don’t even know what’s going on. Usually I have guys coming up to tell me what is going on, or I look on the Jumbotron,” Roethlisberger said. “I don’t know my stats, I just know what the score says, really.”
Although he paid due deference to becoming the first 500-yard repeater, Roethlisberger didn’t sound like a man putting a ton of stock in the record — rather, more in his fellow Steelers who helped win the game.
“Well there have been a lot of great quarterbacks that have played this game, and it’s just such a great honor just to be mentioned in the same breath as a lot of those guys,” he said. “It’s not just [about] me; those guys [his teammates] gave me time, and everyone else made plays.”
CBS analyst Boomer Esiason, who matched Ben’s 522 yards in 1996 with the Arizona Cardinals, was more than happy to do the talking for Roethlisberger’s effort.
“Ben happened to get out of bed on the right side Sunday morning,” Esiason said by phone. “Because looking back and watching that tape again, I think it was the single greatest performance a quarterback has ever had in a game.”
We watched the tape, too. Considering those four or five dropped passes among Roethlisberger’s nine incompletions, Van Brocklin might have gone down.
“I thought they left about 75 or 80 yards on the field, but you never know what would have happened had those plays been completed. Maybe they run it more later, who knows?” Esiason said. “But the fact that he wasn’t sacked and wasn’t intercepted and that it happened so flawlessly and so easily, it was amazing.
“I think it’s the greatest single regular-season performance a quarterback has ever had.”
The 500 Club is populated with current Hall of Famers such as Warren Moon, Dan Marino and Y.A. Tittle, as well as with likely future inductees such as Tom Brady, Drew Brees and perhaps Roethlisberger as well.
But there also are some less distiguished quarterbacks on the esteemed list as well.
• Elvis Grbac, with 70 NFL starts and only 10 other 300-yard passing games, threw for 504 against the Oakland Raiders in 2000.
• Vince Ferragamo, who only had flashes of success in his two NFL stints, threw for 509 against the Chicago Bears in 1982.
• Matt Schaub, the much-maligned backup to Oakland Raiders rookie Derek Carr (and who has thrown an interception on his only Raiders pass attempt this season), is tied with Moon for second all-time with 527 in an overtime game two seasons ago for the Houston Texans against the Jacksonville Jaguars.
History largely has forgotten their efforts. The 500-yard game clearly is clearly exceptional and rare. But is it a clear indication of quarterbacking excellence?
Ready to be shocked? Brett Favre, first all-time in passing yards, had only two 400-yard games in his career. John Elway, fifth all-time, also had just two.
There have been only 19 postseason 400-yard games in NFL history, and three of them were by Don Strock, Jeff George and Kelly Holcomb. Bernie Kosar came the closest to 500 in the playoffs, with 489 against the New York Jets in 1987.
The top five passing-yardage games of all time came in victories, but seven of the other 11 were in losses. Throw out Y.A. Tittle’s seven-TD, no-INT game in 1962, and the aggregate TD-INT ratio of the quarterbacks is a mere 31-20.
“I remember my offensive coordinator at the time, Jim Fassel, said to me, ‘You know, Boom, if you don’t start throwing it to our guys, we are going to bench you.’” Esiason said. “There was a lot of turmoil in Arizona at that time.”
The middling Cardinals were playing the slightly better Washington Redskins at old RFK Stadium, and Esiason had his family, including son Gunnar, who had been diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis a few years earlier, at the game. Right before kickoff, everyone in the stadium was startled by a stunning sight and sound.
“They had a B-2 stealth bomber fly right over the stadium, almost engulfing the entire roof of the stadium,” Esiason said. “I remember it vividly because Gunnar, at five years old … he was such a plane fanatic.
“It took everyone by surprise. No one knew the thing was coming. All I could think of on the sideline was, my 5-year-old son got to see it fly over the stadium. How cool was that?”
The Redskins were celebrating Veteran’s Day, which was the following day. Esiason took it as a sign: He was celebrating Gunnar.
“So when Jim Fassel told me they were thinking about replacing me [later in the game], I said, ‘If you’re going to replace me, that means we are going to fight right here on the sideline.’”
Fassel stuck with Esiason, who had 153 yards at halftime, and asked him to throw to help erase a 14-point deficit. And throw and throw and throw …
It didn’t hurt that the Redskins’ defensive coordinator, Ron Lynn, had been with Esiason and the Bengals four years earlier. Esiason made a very important mental note of Lynn’s tendencies in Week 2 of the 1992 season against the Green Bay Packers.
The Packers’ starting quarterback, Don Majkowski, got hurt. A little-known replacement named Brett Favre was getting his first extended NFL action in the game. The Bengals led by four points with less than a minute left.
“Favre had marched right down the field against our defense that was coordinated by Ron Lynn,” Esiason said. “He was playing cover-2 the whole time.
“So fast-forward four years later [against the Redskins]. In the fourth quarter when we were going no huddle, all that I saw was cover-2 and I knew it was Ron Lynn and that was what he was going to do the whole time. I was basically just alternating plays to go after cover-2.”
The game went to overtime, and Esiason had reached 485 yards in setting up Cardinals kicker Kevin Butler for a 32-yard game-winner. Butler missed the chip shot.
But Esiason never would have reached 522 had that miss not happened. He added 37 more passing yards two drives later to reach the mark and win the game.
“After the game was over, two really unique conversations happened,” Esiason said. “As I am walking off the field, Jim Fassel says, ‘I’m glad we didn’t bench your ass.’
“Number two, Ron Lynn said, ‘I think you just got me fired.’ I remember saying to Ron, who was a great guy and a really good coach, ‘You know, Ron, you gotta stop playing that cover-2 in crunch time.’
Like Esiason’s game, Van Brocklin’s record was set amid unique circumstances.
With no video and few written accounts of the game surviving, there’s a strange mythology about the game, carrying on a Wilt Chamberlain-esque, 100-point game did it actually happen-like life several generations later.
But it did happen.
“Well, the best thing that happened to [the Rams and Van Brocklin] in that game was that they play the New York Yanks,” Pro Football Hall of Fame Vice President Communications/Exhibits Joe Horrigan said. “This was a team that had talent, good individual players from college, but as a team they struggled.”
The record was set in the season opener on an 81-degree day (a Friday, interestingly) at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum before a reported 30,310 fans. The hapless Yanks, who would fold following the 1-9-2 season, had little chance of stopping the torching from Van Brocklin and Co.
“They met a buzzsaw that day,” Horrigan said. “The Rams were loaded, and they were just looking for a victim. You have the league’s two greatest receivers [Hall of Famers Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch and Tom Fears] and it was an offensive juggernaut.”
But there was some controversy, too, with the Rams continuing to chuck it seemingly every play despite leading 41-7 entering the fourth quarter. Van Brocklin technically had been the backup to Bob Waterfield, both eventual Hall of Famers, and Van Brocklin might have sought to prove who the best quarterback was on the roster. So the story goes.
“I could see it,” Horrigan said. “You had two very competitive quarterbacks on that team.”
Remember, too, that it was a run-first, run-second era. The average team passed for 162.7 yards per game in 1951, and the New York Giants — who were 9-2-1 that season — averaged fewer than 100 yards passing per game.
Completion percentages hovered in the mid-40s and quarterbacks were sacked once every 10 times they dropped back to pass. Interceptions outnumbered touchdown passes. Frankly, the forward pass was still viewed with some suspicion, prior to the wide-open Sid Gillman-fueled 1960s; especially compared to the modern era, passing games were crude at best then.
Tittle threw for 505 in 1962, and he stood in the No. 2 spot for 20 years. That’s when Ferragamo and the 1-6 Rams hosted the 2-5 Chicago Bears in a game at Anaheim Stadium, during the strike-shortened 1982 season in which there was no football from mid-September to mid-November.
“Coming off strike, guys were out of condition coming back to the team,” Ferragamo said this week.
The era was still dominated by the run. Ferragamo had seven NFL starts in which he threw for 101 yards or fewer. In the nine weeks of the 1982 season, there were only four other 400-yard passing games.
If there were fireworks anticipated, they would have been from the Bears’ Walter Payton, who was approaching 10,000 rushing yards for his career. The Bears took a 17-0 first-half lead with Payton leading the way. The Rams asked Ferragamo, who had 214 pass yards at halftime, to keep chucking it.
“It’s funny, I had no idea about the record,” Ferragamo said. “I didn’t know a Ram had set it.
“I had [someone] come up to me on the sidelines late in the fourth quarter and say to me, ‘Hey Vince, do you know you’re getting close to a record? You’re closing in on Van Brocklin.’ I had no idea … I had to ask him how many more yards I needed. I suddenly thought, ‘We needed to go overtime!’ ”
The Rams lost 34-26, a two-score loss before the two-point conversion came into the league. He never had a chance. But Ferragamo moved into second place behind Van Brocklin, where he remained until Phil Simms toppled him with 513 yards three years later.
Still, Ferragamo’s performance was not celebrated roundly at the time.
“Walter Payton got more headlines [for surpassing 10,000 yards] than I did in that game, understandably,” Ferragamo said. “And his team won the game.”
Ferragamo, who now is working in real estate in California (and whose business phone number is, no joke, 888-TOUCHDOWN) as well as making wine, says he watches a lot of NFL action these days and that he’s jealous of today’s pass-happy game.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “The rules slant toward the offense. They make it easier to throw. We never played with an empty backfield. We might motion a back out of the backfield and empty out. But it was a whole different era. A 300-yard passing game was a huge game back in my day. Dan Fouts threw for a bunch of them, but other guys just didn’t hit that mark often.”
Esiason agrees.
“You’re going to see more and more of them now because of the rules. One of these days very soon, the 400-yard game is going to be the new benchmark for a good game. It used to be a 300-yard game was the threshold, and before that it was 200 yards,” said Esiason, who also threw for 490 yards in another game.
“Ultimately, when you get players like Andrew Luck and Aaron Rodgers and the next generation of great quarterbacks, why wouldn’t you throw the ball 45-50 times a game?”
In the first 60 years of NFL history, there were only two 500-yard passing games. Since 2006, there have been eight. Van Brocklin is going down one of these days — and very soon.
“Along with the usual suspects,” Esiason said, “I would think when Calvin Johnson comes back, you could put Matthew Stafford in that mix. It would be Luck, Rodgers, Stafford, even Drew Brees. We could get it this weekend in New England [between Peyton Manning and Brady].
Roethlisberger hit that rare level of performance last week. But as the Ferragamo and Esiason games show, it also takes the perfect storm — and a little luck — to reach such a lofty total.
“In order to get that kind of game, it takes two teams to be competitive for four quarters,” Esiason said. “If you’re up 41-10 entering the fourth quarter and you’ve thrown for 395, 420 yards, you’re going to take the air out of the ball. But if you’re up 41-31 at the end of the third quarter, you’re going to continue to throw because you know the other guy is not going to stop.”
Many have come close, but Van Brocklin lives on … more than 31 years after his death.
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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm
