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Beer Baron 2

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The National Football League can be found in the "Sports" or "Real Life" folders of countless trope pages. Here is a list of tropes applying to the NFL.

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A-F

• The Ace: Certain individuals associated with the game have had careers so far beyond what anyone else has had in their position that few arguments can be made that they aren't the "GOAT" (Greatest of All-Time) at that position. To note:
  • With each passing season, arguments against Tom Brady being the greatest QB ever become harder and harder to sustain. With seven Super Bowl victories to his name, he has more than any NFL franchise. Any other stat you want to pick... division titles, post-season wins, regular season wins, overall stats in both... has Brady at or very near the top.
  • Jerry Rice is the greatest modern era WR of all time. With three Super Bowl wins and career records set so high that they are seen as virtually untouchable even in this era of increased passing volume, few are willing to argue otherwise.
  • Lawrence Taylor is widely considered the greatest defensive player of all time, dominating opposing offenses as a three-time Defensive Player of the Year and the last defensive player to win league MVP. He was so good that offensive blocking schemes were invented just to counter him, such as the two-TE set.
• Alliterative Name: The Buffalo Bills, Jacksonville Jaguars, Seattle Seahawks, and Tennessee Titans. Historically, the Chicago Cardinals counted as well.
• All There in the Manual: The official NFL rulebook is available on the league's website for anyone to view. It's a rather imposing 94 page document full of legalize and formal wording, but every rule that could conceivably be applied on game day is contained within.
• Almighty Janitor:
  • Monte Kiffin, a 55+ year coaching veteran most famous for his tenure as defensive coordinator of the Buccaneers where he invented the famed "Tampa 2" defense, won Super Bowl XXXVII, and set a record for finishing in the top 10 of points allowed 10 times in 13 seasons, passed on several opportunities to become an NFL head coach. While other legendary coordinators have failed as NFL head coaches, Kiffin may be the best to never be a head coach.
  • College head coaches who pass on NFL offers are a Downplayed example. Given how many have failed (often spectacularly) at the pro level, including NCAA legends like Nick Saban and Steve Spurrier, it is considered a risky move to go from an elite college program to the NFL. Penn State legend Joe Paterno was a favorite of Raiders owner Al Davis but he turned down offers to join the Raiders repeatedly in the '70s and '80s. David Cutcliffe, a famed "quarterback whisperer" who worked with both Manning brothers, is perhaps the purest modern example, turning down offers from NFL teams and elite college programs alike to stay at Duke, much more of a basketball school where high academic standards limit his recruiting pool.
• Alpha Strike: Examples exist in all three phases of the game:
  • While it goes by various names depending on the team/offense/playcaller in question, the "all five eligible receivers run 'Go' routes to the end zone" is this for the offense. It is almost exclusively seen on "Hail Mary" plays where the offense needs to score a TD to win/tie the game and there isn't enough time remaining to attempt anything else.
  • All-out blitzes are this for the defense. Send everyone you can to sack the QB, but if you fail, it is an easy touchdown for the offense since no one is left back in defense.
  • Punt and field goal block formations are these on special teams. All 11 defenders simply charge in trying for the block, with no one is back to return the punt or to cover for a potential trick play.
• Always Second Best: The Minnesota Vikings and Buffalo Bills have each appeared in four Super Bowls (with the Bills making four consecutive appearances). Both went 0-4 in those appearances, unable to top the opposing conference champion in the big game. (The Broncos used to have this reputation, likewise going 0-4 in the Super Bowl, before turning it around in the '90s.)
• Always Someone Better: There have been a number quarterbacks over the years who always seem to lose when playing against a particular rival. Some notable examples:
  • Bernie Kosar led his Browns to three AFC Championship games in the late '80s, only to lose to John Elway and the Broncos each time.
  • Ben Roethlisberger and the Steelers faced Tom Brady's Patriots three times in AFC Championship games, losing every one.
• Animal Motifs: 15 of the league's 32 teams have some type of animal as their team name^note Bears, Bengals, Bills, Broncos, Cardinals, Colts, Dolphins, Eagles, Falcons, Jaguars, Lions, Panthers, Rams, Ravens, Seahawks, while several more use animals as part of their imagery^note The Browns with a dog, Washington (loosely) with hogs, the Texans with a bull, and the Chiefs with a wolf..
• Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: Played With in multiple ways:
  • As of the 2021 season, all but three of the NFL's majority owners are billionaires^note Those being Detroit's Martha Firestone Ford, Cincinnati's Mike Brown, and Las Vegas' Mark Davis. Green Bay is also an exception, being a publicly traded team, while Pittsburgh has an exception to league rules allowing the Rooney family to remain controlling owners despite no single member of the family controlling the required 30% of shares (combined, they are worth over $1 Billion)., leading to massive sums of money being thrown around in transactions with little fan and media regard.
  • This was a much bigger problem in the past, where bankrupt teams and owners were a constant threat to league stability. The league intentionally dropped many of its smallest market and/or lowest earning teams in the late 1920s, then the Great Depression killed off even more while forcing others to merge. The AFL nearly lost the Raiders and Patriots, if not for Bills owner Ralph Wilson giving each a loan to stay in business. Overspending and the ill-advised decision to go head-to-head with the NFL in the fall (after starting as a spring league) also killed the USFL, the most recent threat to the NFL's pro football dominance.
  • This can also apply to players who often go from lower class (even full blown poverty) to millionaires upon signing their first NFL deals. A study in the mid-2000s showed that a whopping 40% of NFL players went bankrupt within five years of playing their last NFL game. The NFL took steps to address this issue, adding financial courses to their annual "rookie symposium" as well as numerous career training and job placement programs to help players land careers after their playing days are over.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The NFL has roster limits of 53 (during the regular season) and 90 (during the offseason) players, with a few technical exceptions for dealing with injuries. These date back to the days before the salary cap to prevent the top teams from hoarding players. With the salary cap limiting what teams can spend on players as well as minimum salaries based on years of experience, there really is no point in roster limits today; if a team wants to sign 200 players to minimum deals, why shouldn't they be able? Nonetheless, the NFL has been reluctant to expand roster sizes over the years, even after lengthening the season in 2021 and increasing the likelihood of injuries to the starters.
• Artifact Title:
  • The conference names remain from the time when many of the AFC franchises played in the rival AFL before the league merged with the old NFL in 1970.
  • The Steelers are named after Pittsburgh's formerly robust steel industry, which largely died out in the latter half of the 20th century. Its biggest businesses are now healthcare (UPMC) and glassworks.
  • Many position names no longer accurately reflect where they line up on the field. Quarterbacks, so named because they lined up directly behind center ahead of the halfback and fullback, now spend a significant amount of time lined up the shotgun alongside the halfback (now almost universally referred to as simply "running backs"). Before the position began to die off, fullbacks typically lined up in front of the halfbacks to serve as lead blockers. Wide receivers no longer exclusively line up "out wide", instead lining up in the slot or even in-line like tight ends. Many of the league's more athletic tight ends, meanwhile, often split out wide.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • Many teams do not actually play in the cities for which they are named. Neither of the "New York" teams actually play in the city or even the state, instead playing in neighboring New Jersey. The 49ers play in Santa Clara, a 50-minute drive from San Francisco itself. The Cowboys play in Arlington, a half hour away from Dallas.
  • The 2002 division realignment favored keeping old rivalries intact rather than actual geographic proximity. The Cowboys remain in the NFC East, despite being in the country's south-central region. The Indianapolis Colts are in the AFC South, despite being located farther north than the Bengals and the Ravens, two teams in the AFC North. That said, this is actually an improvement to the prior division alignment, with such highlights as the east coast Atlanta Falcons and Carolina Panthers being in the NFC West, while the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were in the NFL Central with a bunch of Great Lakes teams.
• Award Show: The league went this route starting in 2012 with NFL Honors, announcing the winners of all of the major awards the night before the Super Bowl. Previously, these were simply announced in press releases.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • A high volume passing attack with plenty of deep shots is one of the most entertaining offenses in all of football. However, it includes a number of inherent risks which can cause it to backfire spectacularly. For one, it is more turnover prone, not only with interceptions but the risk of the quarterback being strip-sacked by the pass rush as well. Additionally, the deeper drops and extra time needed with the ball leave the (increasingly) highly paid quarterback vulnerable to added injury. As such, modern NFL offenses prioritize getting the ball out of the quarterback's hands quickly with shorter passes when at all possible.
  • Huge blockbuster trades, especially for higher draft picks. Very rarely is a single player worth multiple first round draft picks, but teams will still try. Even worse when the player being traded up for is a draft prospect, especially a quarterback. The loss of those other draft picks means the team won't be able to surround him with as much talent, reducing his potential effectiveness and increasing his odds of busting.
• Awesomeness by Analysis:
  • A hallmark of Peyton Manning's career was his ability to read the defense at the line of scrimmage before the snap, then make adjustments on the fly to counter what the defense appeared to be doing. Even into his late career, as his physical abilities deteriorated due to age and injury, he was able to serve as an effective game manager with this ability to win one final Super Bowl with the Broncos.
  • Former Cowboys QB Tony Romo went straight from the league into the broadcast booth as the color commentator for the #1 CBS broadcast team. He has quickly shown a unique ability in this role to precisely predict plays seconds before they happen, including routes, coverages, and calling out exactly who the QB will throw to. Other networks attempted to replicate Romo's success by hiring recently retired players and coaches of their own, with decidedly lesser results.
• Badass Cape: Heavy capes have long been worn on NFL sidelines during cold weather games, as they are easier to put on over pads than coats and can be removed quickly when the player needs to return to the game. All-time great RB Walter Payton's cape became so iconic that it is now part of the patch "Walter Payton Man of the Year" award winners get to wear on their jerseys.
• Badass Preacher:
  • Hall of Fame defensive lineman Reggie White was an ordained minister, earning him the nickname "Minister of Defense".
  • Super Bowl LII winning-quarterback Nick Foles is studying for the ministry as his career plan for after football.
• Barbarian Longhair: Countless great players have sported long hair which flows out the bottoms of their helmets. Bonus points when one of these players is a more "barbaric" position like a linebacker or pass rusher, such as Hall of Famers Kevin Greene, who sported long blonde hair that evoked Hulk Hogan, and Troy Polamalu, who did not shave his long curly hair to honor his Samoan heritage (and got a multi-million deal with Head and Shoulders shampoo out of it).
• Battle in the Rain: There are at least a few prominent games every season which are heavily impacted by the weather, though they are getting a little less common as more teams adopt indoor domes. A major YMMV split among fans (and even some players) is whether playing in the elements improves or detracts from the game. Some notable historic examples:
  • Super Bowl XLI (won by Peyton Manning's Colts over the Bears) was played outdoors in Miami during a rainstorm.
  • The "Mud Bowl" was a Monday Night Football game between the Steelers and Dolphins in 2007 in Pittsburgh. Due to both heavy rain as well as a series of high school and college football games played at the stadium in the days prior, the field was a muddy mess. The game was a 0-0 scoreless tie until the Steelers won by kicking a field goal in the final seconds. One of the game's biggest highlights was a punt sticking in the mud upon landing rather than bouncing.
• Beastly Bloodsports: Michael Vick went from a superstar being played up as a new "face of the league" to a prison sentence and Unperson status from the NFL due to his role in a dogfighting ring. While he did return to the league for stints with the Eagles, Jets, and Steelers, his infamy from his cruel hobby remains.
• The Benchwarmer: NFL teams have 22 starting players, 11 on each side of the ball, plus three "specialists" in the kicker, punter, and long snapper who will see action in every game. They also have 53 men on their in-season roster, meaning more than half of the roster is made up of backup players. While some still see the field in certain packages or as "rotational" players who come in to give the starters rest, many will, barring injury, never see the field. Some particularly notable examples:
  • Earl Morrall is known as the "patron saint of backup quarterbacks" for a reason. He bounced around six teams over the course of his 21 seasons in the league, backing up legends including Hall of Famers Johnny Unitas and Bob Griese, winning an MVP and a Super Bowl, and contributing to the Dolphins' perfect season.
  • Chase Daniel has been in the league for 12 seasons across six teams, serving as a backup quarterback with only five career starts in that span. Nonetheless, he has earned over $38 million in this role.
• Big Eater: In order to remain in football shape, NFL players eat an average of about 4,000 calories a day, nearly double what is recommended for an average male. For larger positions like linemen, this can easily reach 6,000 calories a day. In modern times, this intake is carefully monitored by a team's training staff with a heavy dose of sports science applied to determine the optimal types of food to eat as well as when to consume them.
• Big Little Brother: Numerous examples throughout league history. Some of the more prominent:
  • Hall of Fame CB Champ Bailey was listed at 6'0", 190 lbs. His younger brother Boss was a linebacker listed at 6'3", 230 lbs.
  • Chris and Kyle Long are the sons of Hall of Famer Howie Long. Chris, the older brother, was a defensive end listed at 6'3", 266 lbs. Kyle, an offensive lineman, dwarfed him, listed at 6'6, 313 lbs.
  • Baseball legend Mark McGwire was listed at 6'5", 215 lbs. His younger brother Dan was a quarterback selected in the 1st round of the 1991 Draft by Seattle, listed at 6'8", 240 lbs, making him the tallest QB ever drafted and one of the tallest players overall.
• Blessed with Suck: Prior to the institution of a rookie salary structure in 2011, high draft picks were this. As the NFL awards draft picks based on an inverse order of the standings, the worst teams got the top choices of incoming prospects, which sounds great. However, no matter how good these players were in college, projecting success at the pro level is still a major gamble. By the 2000s, these players demanded salaries in the range of the the highest paid veterans at their positions, knowing that the team selecting them would be forced to agree or else risk the player holding out and getting nothing out of their top draft choice. In 2010, #1 overall pick QB Sam Bradford received a contract that put him in the top five highest paid quarterbacks in the league before even taking his first professional snap. When these players "busted", the team not only lost out on the high draft choice used to select but millions of dollars as well. Each year, it was speculated that the teams with the top choices may try to trade down to avoid having to pay inexperienced players so much money, but they rarely found trade partners. In 2011, the league instituted a rookie salary structure, significantly limiting the amount rookies could be paid to address this issue. It also opened up more trading at the top of the draft, making it much more exciting for fans and media.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Fans generally don't tune in to see an up-the-middle rushing attack, but it is easily the most practical offensive play in football. It is low risk compared to outside runs (which can be stuffed for big losses) or passes (where sacks and interceptions are possible), but even in today's modern "passing league", the most consistently successful teams in the league are those than can still "pound the rock".
  • On defense, the "two deep zone" has the safeties cover each half of the field deep. While it can be vulnerable to runs and quick passes over the middle, it is perhaps the "safest" defense to play as it prevents deep passes and is the cornerstone of the league's "bend but don't break" defensive concepts. Sure, the opponent may pick up an easy 4-6 yards per play, but can they do that 12-14 plays in a row as they inch up the field without allowing a sack or committing a turnover? That is what these style of defenses, popularized by head coaches like Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith, are built on.
  • In terms of the draft, offensive linemen are easily the most "boring" players for teams to select high. They don't really touch the ball, they don't make any "splashy" plays, and, if they play well, you might go entire broadcasts without hearing their names. However, they are historically the "safest" players to select with a first round draft pick. Discounting a few high profile exceptions, offensive linemen selected in the first round are the most likely to make a Pro Bowl and least likely to "bust" outright.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Wealthier teams have naturally had an advantage throughout NFL history, though the league has implemented several means over the years in attempt to defy this trope and maintain competitive balance. The NFL Draft, first held in 1936, ensured that the worst teams would get an opportunity to select the top talent coming out of college football. When a court order forced the NFL to allow true free agency in 1993, the league instituted a "salary cap" (based on a percentage of the league revenue in agreement with the Player's Union) to keep the richer teams from signing all of the best free agent talent.
• Broken Ace: Most if not all of the game's greatest players have dealt with inner demons of some kind. Even still, Lawrence Taylor stands out as a particularly notable example. Decades after his playing career ended, he is still considered by many to be the most gifted linebacker to ever play the game. His on-field legend has largely obscured the extent to which most observers in the media and on his own team viewed him as a walking time-bomb, as his heavy drug use and party-all-night exploits were an Open Secret that coaches and regulators largely looked away from until they just couldn't anymore. While Taylor sobered up in the final years of his career to avoid being kicked out of the league, he later confessed that, even with all his wealth, fame, and talent, he saw the chance to take cocaine again as the only bright spot in his future. The fact that he was able to accomplish all he did on the filed while living such an unhealthy and unsafe lifestyle makes one wonder what he might have achieved without it. Sadly, these things did finally catch up with him after his retirement, leading to decades of legal and financial issues for one of the league's living legends.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: A major factor in some of the league's most famous draft busts. While a player can coast on their elite talent in high school and even into college, even the most talented players still need to work hard in order to compete in the NFL with its more advanced scheming and gameplanning and greater competition. Many of the biggest draft busts in history were dominant college players but simply didn't put in the effort needed to succeed in the mental aspects of the NFL. One notable example: JaMarcus Russell, selected #1 overall by the Raiders in 2007, was once given a blank DVD by the coaching staff and told that it had some plays on it they wanted him to study. When he came in the next day, he told them that he liked "all of them", proving he never watched it.
• Brown Bag Mask: Made famous in the NFL by Saints fans in the first several decades of the teams existence who wore such masks in the stands at home games. That notoriously lousy era of Saints football saw the team referred to as the "Aint's". Lions fans also did this during the infamous Matt Millen era in the mid-'00s, which ended with the league's first ever 0-16 season.
• Came Back Strong: Downplayed in that it is not coming back from death, but numerous players in league history have come back from devastating injuries or illnesses to perform even better than before. The "Comeback Player of the Year" award recognizes these performances. Notable examples include Chiefs safety Eric Berry winning the award in 2015 after beating cancer and Washington QB Alex Smith winning in 2020 after returning from a leg injury so severe that it nearly required amputation.
• Can't Catch Up:
  • This was a serious concern for NFL owners and management during the '60s when talk of merger with the rival AFL was at its peak. The AFL was seen as a class below the better established NFL, with the NFL's Packers blowing out the AFL champions in the first two Super Bowls. This changed when the AFL's Jets, led by Joe Namath who "guaranteed" their victory, defeated the heavily favored Colts in Super Bowl III, cementing the merger.
  • From 1984-1996, the NFC champion won the Super Bowl over the AFC champion every single year. This stretch included some of the worst blowouts in Super Bowl history as well, including the '85 Bears epic 46-10 beatdown of the Patriots in XX, Washington's 42-10 defeat of the Broncos in XXII, and the 49ers Super Bowl record 55-10 defeat of the Broncos (again) in XXIV. Ironically, the Broncos finally broke this streak, winning two straight Super Bowls following the '97 and '98 seasons.
• Career-Ending Injury: Unfortunately common in such a physical sport. Some of the more prominent historical examples:
  • Greg Cook was a promising rookie QB for the Bengals in 1969 but suffered a torn rotator cuff in his throwing shoulder and further damaged it by attempting to play thought it. A botched surgery the following offseason ended his career.
  • Washington QB Joe Theismann suffered a gruesome compound fracture in his lower leg during a 1985 Monday Night Football game when he was sacked by Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor. Caught on primetime television with multiple replays capturing all of the gruesome detail, it is likely the best remembered example of this in pro football and possibly all pro sports.
  • 33 years to the date after Theismann's injury, another Washington QB, Alex Smith suffered a very similar injury. After multiple surgeries and nearly losing both the leg and his life to infection, Smith subverted the trope by returning for one final season two years later.
• Christmas Miracle:
  • Sitting at 0-14 and on their way to what looked to be the second winless 16-game season in NFL history, the Browns faced the Chargers on Christmas Eve 2016. Down 20-17 in the final seconds, the Chargers missed a game-tying field goal attempt, giving the Browns their only victory of the season. This would also be their last win until week three of the 2018 season; if not for this single victory in 2016, they would have been the first team to ever go winless in two straight seasons.
  • On Christmas 2020, the Saints took on the Vikings, and Saints RB Alvin Kamara tied a 91-year old record, becoming only the second player to score six rushing touchdowns in a single game (while wearing festive red-and-green cleats, no less).
• Clothes Make the Superman: In the literal sense, American football requires a great deal of protective gear. There are some instances of the gear having an actual effect on the game.
  • Kicker Tom Dempsey didn't have toes on his kicking foot and wore a modified shoe on that foot. His successful 63-yard field goal in 1970 shattered existing records and stood as the longest successful attempt for decades; because many at the time speculated that this was because of his footwear, the league passed a rule standardizing footwear a few years later.
  • A number of teams (the Cincinnati Bengals in the '80s, the Denver Broncos, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Tennessee Titans^note who also changed their name from the Oilers in the '90s, the Seattle Seahawks in the 2000s) reached or won their franchise's first Super Bowl soon after noticeably changing their traditional uniforms, colors, and logo designs into something less garish and more modern/aggressive; the Bucs even won their second Super Bowl the season they changed their design back to look more similar to the unis they wore to win their first. Whether wearing a "cooler" uniform actually has any role in motivating teams to play better is an open question, but expect fans to still bring this up whenever there's a team uniform change or rebranding.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Used by many players and even coaches. The trash talk out on the field can get aggressive and... creative, and TV broadcasters have a hard time catching every curse before it slips out to a national audience. Meanwhile, officials are usually on the receiving end of such tirades from coaches after what the coach deems to be a bad call. If it goes too far, they can be penalized for Unsportsmanlike Conduct.
• Comeback Mechanic:
  • Downplayed in individual games as there are no special rules favoring the trailing team, but the standard rules include numerous clock stoppages and means of retaining possession that are more beneficial to trailing teams. Going out of bounds to stop the clock, "spiking" the ball to trade a down for a clock stoppage, going for onside kicks to try to get the ball back after scoring... it can be nerve wracking for the team holding a lead as the trailing team pulls out all of these tricks to come from behind.
  • The NFL Draft is designed to be this at the franchise level. The order each year is the inverse of the league standings, so the worst teams get the top picks of incoming prospects.
• Competitive Balance: The league takes steps every offseason (and sometimes in-season if something is unbalancing enough) to ensure competitive balance. The "Competition Committee" in particular, made up of veteran owners, general managers, and head coaches, will propose rule changes promote balance, close loopholes, and generally make the games more exciting. These proposals are then voted on by all 32 owners (or their representatives) at league meetings, requiring a 2/3 majority to go into effect.
• Continuity Snarl: Due to relocations, rebrandings, and changes in ownership, several of the league's teams have convoluted histories that the "official" record recognized by the NFL smooths over or ignores. Some notable examples:
  • The Cleveland Browns, their infamous "move" to become the Baltimore Ravens, and then a "new" Browns team taking the place of the old one requires some serious mental gymnastics to keep straight. The original team wanted to move to Baltimore, but the city of Cleveland won a lawsuit against the NFL. This ensured that, while the team's roster and staff would move to Baltimore to become an "expansion team" known as the Baltimore Ravens, a new team would begin operating in Cleveland under the old Browns banner three years later. While the new Browns team was initially stocked with personnel in the way that expansion teams usually are (expansion draft and being given the #1 pick in each round of the draft), the NFL considers the Browns to be one continuous franchise that "suspended" operations for three years, retaining all the awards the team had won prior to the move.
  • Baltimore's previous team, the Indianapolis Colts, have their own complicated history that makes the Browns' look simple by comparison:
    • Some argue that the Colts' history dates all the way back to start of the NFL, specifically to an original team, the Dayton Triangles. The Triangles' franchise was bought by the founders of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1929, though they released almost all of the players. The Dodgers spent one year merged with the Boston Yanks before the owner brought the players to the AAFC as the New York Yankees, then merged with that league's Brooklyn Dodgers to become the New York-Brooklyn Yankees. The team's assets were later split between the New York Giants and Bulldogs (formerly the Boston Yanks) after the NFL-AAFC merger. The Bulldogs renamed themselves the Yanks, who folded a few years later. Their rights and players were bought by the Dallas Texans, which also immediately folded. Then their rights, players, and uniforms were purchased by the new Baltimore Colts in 1953. Though there is some continuity in ownership, players, and property between all of these teams, the NFL doesn't recognize any of this genealogy prior to 1953.
    • Speaking of genealogy, the Colts actually have another branch of predecessors in the NFL: another team also called the Baltimore Colts that made the leap to the NFL in 1950 from the AAFC with the Browns and 49ers but folded after a year. The new team picked up this team's city, stadium, name, and marching band, but the NFL likewise doesn't recognize this short-lived team as part of the modern Colts history.
    • In the '80s, the Colts infamously moved to Indianapolis where they continue to play today, taking their Baltimore history and records with them. However, the move was so acrimonious and hated by Baltimore fans and former star players that, when the Ravens landed in town, many old Colts fans declared the Ravens to be the true Colts successor. Ravens ownership, trying to make up for the goodwill they lost for abandoning Cleveland, played into this by adopting the Colts' old marching band and erecting statues of former Baltimore Colts greats around their stadium, even though the NFL still sticks with the franchise rather than regional history as the "official" record.
• Cool Old Guy:
  • George Blanda, nicknamed "The Grand Old Man", is the oldest person to have played professional football, aged 48 in his final season which spanned four decades. While he was exclusively a kicker by the end, he also played QB for much of his early career. Due to playing in an era where pro athletes were much more "working class" and health/diet standards nowhere near the modern expectations, he somehow looked even older◊ than his age.
  • Guard Ray Brown is the oldest non-QB, non-specialist in modern NFL history to play a game, doing so at age 43 in his final season with Washington.
  • CB Darrell Green is the oldest defensive player to play a game aged 42 in his final season, spending his entire 20 year career with Washington.
  • RB is the position with the shortest career on average due to the physical toll it takes to play. This makes it all the more impressive when an older RB does something notable. Frank Gore, at age 36, became the oldest player to rush for 100 yards in a game and then, a year later at 37, became the oldest player to rush for 500 yards in a season. Washington's John Riggins is the oldest player to rush for 1,000+ yards and score 10+ touchdowns, doing so at age 35.
  • Some of the non-player figures in the NFL count as this. Bears founder George Halas was an accomplished player himself, coached his own team on and off for 40 years, and was widely held up as one of the sport's great figures before his passing in 1983
• Cool Shades:
  • A staple of QB Jim McMahon, most famous for his time with the Bears in the '80s. Justified, as he suffered an eye injury as a child that left him sensitive to light.
  • Dark tinted helmet visors look undeniably cool, though the NFL currently forbids them without a doctor's order. Hall of Famers RB LaDainian Tomlinson and LB Ray Lewis are two of the most famous for sporting these.
• Cowboys and Indians: Part of the rivalry between the Cowboys and Redskins for their first 50+ years of existence. Now that Washington has dropped the offensive nickname, this no longer applies.
• Creator Provincialism:
  • The classic media "East Coast Bias" remains strong in the NFL, helped by the fact that 15 of the league's 32 teams play in the eastern time zone. Tex Schramm, the first GM of the Cowboys, exploited this trope by making sure his team played in the same division as the Giants and Eagles, representing two of the largest media markets, so they would get plenty of play in east coast media.
  • On a global scale, like most North American sports, the Super Bowl winner is declared "World Champion" despite the league having no teams from outside of the US.
• Crippling Overspecialization: In the modern NFL, players typically only play a single position. The aptly named "specialists" (kickers, punters, and long-snappers) very rarely do anything else for their teams. In the league's early days, however, players frequently played in all three phases of the game. These "60 Minute Men" ceased to be by the '60s, with a few players still contributing in a standard position as well as a kicker or punter. (Lou Groza and George Blanda were two of the last to regularly play in this fashion.)
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
  • Eli Manning developed this reputation after leading the Giants to Super Bowl wins in '07 and '11, defeating Tom Brady's Patriots both times. His career regular season record as starter is .500, he never dominated statistically despite his career overlapping with a major increase in passing leaguewide, and he wasn't a vocal leader with a rather dopey demeanor to him. Nonetheless, he dominated in the postseason both of those years, coming up with incredibly clutch plays in both Super Bowls, on his way to winning.
  • Joe Flacco was Eli's AFC equivalent during his time with the Ravens. Quiet and reserved, he never put up big numbers in the defensively oriented Ravens' more conservative offense, but he led them to the playoffs each of his first five seasons and set a record for road playoff victories in that time. In 2012, he had a postseason for the ages as he led the Ravens to a victory in Super Bowl XLVII.
• Crutch Character: There are typically veteran free agents available in-season that teams will sign when they suffer a major injury at that position. Often, these players are older and in physical decline, which is why they didn't sign during the offseason. However, their experience allows them to step right into prominent, sometimes starting roles when called upon. Some veteran players will even refuse offseason offers in order to sign with a team in this fashion where they'll be more likely to contribute. While there are examples every year, the Panthers signing 43-year-old QB Vinnie Testaverde in 2007 after losing their starting QB in week three is an especially notable one. He was immediately installed as starter and played six games that year, becoming the oldest QB to start and win a game after turning 44.
• Cuckoolander Commentator:
  • John Madden, whose tendency to fall into Captain Obvious mode, his fondness for the telestrator, his constant use of Malapropers, occasional near-incoherent ramblings, and starting some bizarre trends (Turducken, the Madden bus) combine to make him a prominent example in real life sports history. However, it is also the reason he is one of the most beloved commentators in sports history as well.
  • Booger McFarland is a more infamous example, coming from his ill-received two-year stint on Monday Night Football. Joining the program in 2018, the Embarrassing Nickname-d McFarland initially reported from the "Booger Mobile", a strange "booth-on-rails" contraption that moved up and down the sideline, accomplishing little more than obscuring the view of fans in the (typically expensive) front rows of seats. In 2019, the Booger Mobile was scrapped and he took his spot next to Joe Tessitore in the actual broadcast booth. He was widely criticized and mocked for his commentary, which veered back and forth from Captain Obvious pronouncements to Cloud Cuckoo Lander statements that made it seem he was watching an entirely different game than the one on the field. McFarland was moved off of MNF the following offseason.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The most lopsided defeat in NFL history came during the 1940 NFL Championship game when the Bears defeated Washington 73-0. They had lost to Washington 7-3 in the regular season, after which Washington's infamous owner George Preston Marshall called them "crybabies". Bears Hall of Fame owner and coach George Halas used Marshall's words to get his team fired up, and it worked. The Bears intercepted Washington eight times, returning three for touchdowns, while dominating on offense all game. By the 4th quarter, the referee asked Halas to start running or passing the ball for the extra point (the two-point conversion didn't exist yet) as they were running out of footballs. (There was no net behind the field goal posts to catch and return the balls at the time.) The margin of victory is not only the largest-ever in the NFL, but in any major American professional team sport, with only a few (much higher scoring) NBA games coming close.
  • In 1976, the Rams blew out the Falcons 59-0, the most lopsided defeat of the NFL's modern era. In 2009, the Patriots matched it by blowing out the Titans.
  • The '85 Bears, in contention for one of the greatest teams of all time and certainly one of the greatest defenses of all time, did this to each postseason opponent. They first shout out the Giants 21-0, then the Rams 24-0 in the Conference Championship. In Super Bowl XX, they put up a then-Super Bowl record 46-10 blowout of the Patriots, including not allowing their starting QB to complete a pass before he was benched.
  • The reason the Bears score was a "then" record is because, four years later in Super Bowl XXIV, the 49ers blew out the Broncos by an even wider margin, 55-10. In fact, the Broncos have the dubious distinction of being on the losing end of three of he worst Super Bowl blowouts in history. Besides XXIV against the 49ers, they lost 42-10 to Washington in Super Bowl XXII and later 43-8 to the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLVIII.
• Cursed with Awesome: Prospects who are projected to go very high in the draft but who "slide" to a lower pick in the first round will earn less in their rookie contract and typically take it as a slight to their talents. However, as the draft order is the inverse of the league's standings, going to a team with a lower pick typically means going to a better team. They can come in and immediately contribute to a Super Bowl contender while players selected before them may endure years of rebuilding with less talented teammates and inferior coaches before contending (if they ever reach that point).
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Rule changes limiting or banning certain styles of play can cause a tough adjustment for players who once relied upon them. Some notable examples:
  • After the "horse collar tackle" was banned, frequent user Cowboys safety Roy Williams became the first player to be suspended for using it the following season.
  • The 2005 emphasis on illegal contact saw a number of physical corners go from quality players to liabilities. One of the biggest perpetrators was Packers CB Ahmad Carroll, who went from starting corner to being released in-season after a game in which he committed three of these penalties.
• The Dandy: Part of the reputation of Hall of Fame QB Joe Namath. In addition to his success on the field, his laid-back demeanor and sense of style (including mink coats) made him one of the most popular players of all time.
• Dark Horse Victory: Former NFL Commissioner Bert Bell summed it up best when he said: "On Any Given Sunday, any team can beat any other team.” Some of the more historically significant examples:
  • Super Bowl III saw the heavily favored NFL champion Baltimore Colts taking on the AFL champion New York Jets. The first two Super Bowls were blowouts in favor of the NFL and most expected this game to be more of the same. Jets QB Joe Namath then "guaranteed" a victory and the Jets followed through by pulling off the upset, showing that the AFL could compete with the NFL after all and assuaging concerns about merging the two leagues.
  • The 2005 Steelers became the first #6 seed to win the Super Bowl, upsetting every playoff opponent on the road before defeating the Seahawks in Super Bowl XL. The 2010 Packers became the second #6 seed to accomplish this, ironically defeating the Steelers in Super Bowl XLV.
  • The 2007 Giants were a 10-6 Wild Card team who backed into the playoffs after losing in the final week of the regular season to the Patriots, giving the Patriots the first 16-0 regular season in NFL history. The Giants surprised the football world by making it to the Super Bowl where they would face... that very same Patriots team, attempting to complete a perfect 19-0 season. As 12 point underdogs who had already lost to the Patriots that season, no one gave the Giants a realistic chance of winning. After harassing Tom Brady with an elite pass rush and completing the legendary "David Tyree helmet catch" during the game-winning drive, the Giants emerged victorious. In 2011, the Giants did it again, entering the playoffs with a 9-7 record and eventually defeating the Patriots.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Modern NFL offenses, due in large part to unrelated but synergistic rule changes designed to open up passing offenses and protect players, especially quarterbacks, have caused the short passing game to thrive. Short drops with the QB getting the ball out of his hands as quickly as possible have become a staple of offenses league-wide with only a select few exceptions. Drives of 12+ plays where the offense "dinks and dunks" their way down the field against a frustrated, exhausted defense are far more common than in any era before. The Patriots during Tom Brady's tenure with the team were a prime example of this, with slot receivers, tight ends, and running backs being bigger contributors to the passing game than the traditional outside receivers.
• Death or Glory Attack:
  • "Gunslinger" quarterbacks, perhaps best exemplified by Brett Favre (though there have been many others before and after), live by this trope. Preferring to take riskier deeper pass attempts over check downs or throwing the ball away, they generate many big plays for the offense... and the opposing defense, who eagerly intercept some of these wild pass attempts.
  • All-out blitzes typically send eight or even nine defenders after the QB. Succeed and they can get a big sack, possibly strip the football for a fumble, or force a bad pass attempt that can be intercepted. Fail and there is all but guaranteed to be at least one wide open receiver who will make the defense pay.
• Deep South: Given that the traditional deep south areas have some of the nation's strongest high school and college football programs, it's little surprise that many NFL players sport these accents. It is especially notable, and even detrimental, when one of these players is drafted to a northern team where it stands out even more. Famously, Hall of Fame QB Terry Bradshaw, from Louisiana, was selected #1 overall by the Steelers in 1970. His accent did not help his perceived lack of intelligence, though he had the last laugh; despite some early struggles, he led Pittsburgh to four Super Bowl titles by the end of the decade.
• Defeating the Undefeatable: The 2007 Patriots were the NFL's first 16-0 team, defeating the 10-6 Giants in week 17 to clinch the record. A month later, the two met again in Super Bowl XLII where the Giants were heavy underdogs. Their pass rush harassed what, at the time, was the highest scoring offense in NFL history while QB Eli Manning pulled off several critical plays to win 17-14.
• Dented Iron: Many players, especially later in their careers, have powered through so many injuries that the effects stack up and leave them less physically capable late in their careers. They can often remain effective thanks to their years of experience. Some notable examples:
  • By his final season in 2015, Peyton Manning (never the most physically adept QB to begin with) had been robbed of what little mobility he had and suffered a notable decrease in arm strength due to age and injury. Nonetheless, he led the Broncos to a Super Bowl win by using his wisdom and experience to lead as a classic "game manager", avoiding mistakes while enabling the run game and defense to win the game.
  • In their later years, former NFL players have a signicantly increased chance of suffering from Chronic Traumatic Encephaolpathy (CTE), a type of dementia caused by repeated head trauma. It certainly isn't pleasant to think about past NFL heroes suffering from such a terrible disease, but many do.
• Desperation Attack:
  • The "Hail Mary" is a classic. The offense sends every receiver to the end zone and the quarterback throws up a high, arcing pass. Because the defense can put more defenders back than the offense has eligible receivers, the likelihood of an interception is too high for an offense to attempt this outside of the final play of a half.
  • If the offense is too far away from the end zone for the pass to reach it, they will instead try to work the ball down the field with multiple laterals. These plays are even riskier than the hail mary as any dropped ball counts as a fumble, so it won't be used unless it is the final play of the game. The 2018 "Miracle in Miami", 2003 "River City Relay", and 2000 "Music City Miracle" are examples of this type of play working.
  • The onside kick is typically attempted by the trailing team after they've scored late in the game and are attempting to get the ball back to score again. Due to the low odds of success, the great field position it gives the other team if they recover, and the chances of it going out of bounds which draws a penalty, it is quite risky. That said, there have been cases of "surprise onside kicks" succeeding, as was the case for the Saints in Super Bowl XLIV.
• Determinator: Throughout the course of an NFL season, every player will be "playing through the pain" of a minor injury at one point or another. Some prominent historic examples:
  • In 1979, Hall of Fame Rams DE Jack Youngblood suffered a broken fibula in the first game of the playoffs. He continued to play through the injury during the postseason, including the Rams Super Bowl XIV loss and even played in the Pro Bowl, an exhibition all-star game even non-injured players often skip.
  • QB Brett Favre set the NFL record by starting 321 consecutive games. During that time, he played through numerous injuries, including countless concussions and most famously a broken thumb on his throwing hand. He also put up one of the greatest performances of his career the day after his father passed away.
• Developer's Foresight: The NFL has a number of obscure rules in place to handle scenarios that will almost certainly never happen. Some notable examples:
  • A "one-point safety" is possible during an extra point or two-point conversion attempt. However, it has never actually happened in NFL history. It would require a tackle for loss of 85^note On an extra point attempt or 98^note On a two-point conversion try yards in the opposite end zone or a "double turnover" which is recovered by the offense in their own end-zone.
  • There are rules regarding a forfeit, which has never happened for a meaningful game in modern NFL history.^note The Eagles forfeited a 2001 preseason game against the Ravens due to poor field quality. If a team were to forfeit a meaningful contest, the final score would officially be listed as "2-0", because the two-point safety is the only type of point in the entire NFL that is not attributed to a single player.
  • The NFL has rules regarding a "Disaster", officially described as an event in which 15 or more members of a team "die or are dismembered", such as in a crash of the team plane or natural disaster. If it occurs in-season, the commissioner has full authority on whether the team should continue play. If it is decided that they will, that team is given priority on all waiver claims for the rest of the season (these normally go to the team with the worst record). If they lost a quarterback in the "disaster", they may select a quarterback from another team which has at least three, with those teams being able to "protect" two of them. If the season is canceled or the "disaster" occurs in the offseason, the NFL will instead hold a "Disaster Draft", with rules very similar to the Expansion Draft for brand new teams. It has never been enacted and hopefully never will, but the rules are in place if needed.
• Disco Dan: The media played up this image of Raiders owner/GM Al Davis later in his life, especially after his once-great team fell from regular contention. Davis had started wearing his Iconic Outfit of a white track suit and chained sunglasses in the '70s, an era where most teams' staff wore suits and ties even on the sideline, as a symbol of his renegade style. The look worked for him when he was young and his "Just win, baby" management style brought the team immense success. His refusal to adjust his choices in attitude, management, or clothing to either the era he lived in and his own advancing age proved an apt metaphor once his team dropped to the basement of the league's standings as he likewise refused to update his managing philosophy.
• Disqualification-Induced Victory: The Cardinals, then in Chicago, were awarded the 1925 NFL Championship (their first as a franchise) in this fashion. The original champion, the now-defunct Pottsville Maroons, were suspended by the commissioner for having played two exhibition games in Philadelphia, supposedly violating the territorial rights of the also-defunct Frankford Yellow Jackets. To make up the games, Pottsville quickly scheduled, played, and won two more games. However, they were found to have hired four ineligible high school players for those games, and were again suspended as well as stripped of their championship. The NFL reviewed the case two more times in 1963 and 2003 but still recognizes the Cardinals as the 1925 champions.
• Does Not Like Shoes: A number of kickers throughout the history of the league preferred to kick barefoot. Tony Franklin, Rich Karlis, and Mike Lansford were some of the last with the practice fizzling out in the '80s. Though still technically legal, it is considered obsolete with advances in kicking shoe technology in the time since.
• Down to the Last Play: Seems to happen in a game at least once every week, but for the sake of brevity, some of the more historically significant examples:
  • In Super Bowl XXXIV, the favored St. Louis Rams took a 23–16 lead just after the two minute warning in the fourth quarter. The underdog Titans started their final drive of regulation at their own 10 yard line in an attempt to tie the game and force the first ever Super Bowl overtime. The Titans managed to move the ball 80 yards in 1:48. On the Rams' 10 yard line with time for one last play, Titans QB Steve McNair completed a pass to wide receiver Kevin Dyson shy of the goal line. Rams linebacker Mike Jones tackled Dyson by the legs and dragged him to the ground as Dyson stretched the ball out in an attempt to reach the goal line, but fell just under one yard shy as time expired. So, after an 80 yard, 1:48 rally, the Titans fell less than a yard shy of tying the game (or winning outright if they chose to go for two) and the Rams won the Super Bowl 23–16.
  • Super Bowl LI between the Patriots and Falcons was the first Super Bowl to go to overtime (after Atlanta blew a 25 point lead). Pats RB James White scored on a two-yard TD run to end it and bring home the win.
  • In the 2017-18 NFC Divisional Round, the Vikings were hosting the Saints. The Saints were ahead by one point with 10 seconds left, neither team had a timeout, and the Vikings were about thirty yards outside of field-goal range. Vikings QB Case Keenum, just trying to get his team into range for a FG, threw a desperation heave that WR Stefon Diggs caught. If tackled in bounds the game would be over; however, two Saints defenders whiffed on Diggs who ran in it for a game-winning TD now known as the "Minneapolis Miracle".
  • In 2020, the Bills held a 30-26 lead over the Cardinals. With 11 seconds to go, Cardinals QB Kyler Murray dodged several Bills pass rushers before tossing a 43-yard Hail Mary pass into the end zone. Despite being surrounded by three Bills defenders, WR DeAndre Hopkins hauled in the pass for the game-winning TD. The "Hail Murray", as it has come to be called, was named the 2020 Play of the Year.
• Dream-Crushing Handicap: The Manning family is one of the most notable in NFL history, consisting of father Archie and sons Peyton and Eli. There is another Manning brother, Cooper, who was an all-state wide receiver in high school but was forced to quit football as a freshman in college when a risky spinal cord condition was discovered.
• Drench Celebration: The Trope Maker and Trope Codifier. The first on record was done to Giants head coach Bill Parcells in 1986, the year they won the Super Bowl, showing the practice to a national audience. Now it is a yearly tradition for the Super Bowl winning coach and has made its way into countless other sports.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Many coaches have this reputation. Some of the most prominent include:
  • Paul Brown may be Trope Codifier as far as NFL coaches go. Despite bringing many innovations to the game and his work to desegregate the league, he rode his players notoriously hard. When his harsh methods stopped leading to wins, he was fired from his namesake team.
  • Tom Coughlin was easily the best coach in Jaguars history, then led the Giants to two Super Bowl wins in '07 and '11. Despite this, he was strongly disliked by many of his players for his "nastier" habits. For example, players were expected to be five minutes early to every meeting, being on time was considered late, and he would fine players who showed up on time. When he later returned to the Jaguars, the team's players produced nearly one-fourth of the complaints filed with the NFLPA, and Coughlin was dismissed after most of the team's great players began openly seeking trades rather than continue to work for him.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Almost any achievement made in the NFL today will have some asterisk on it referencing "the modern/Super Bowl era" (referring to either the creation of the AFL in 1960 or the first Super Bowl in 1966) due to how dramatically different the game and league are now compared to its early years.
  • For the first 15 years of the NFL, there was no set schedule. Teams were free to schedule as many (or as few) games as they wished. Scheduling was usually done on the fly, which occasionally resulted in some late-season scheduling skullduggery. The league championship was decided solely on winning percentage, which did not factor in ties (which were also far more common then they are today). Many teams also came and went from the league in that time; it was only in the mid-1930s when the NFL began stabilizing its membership, and only two of the original 14 teams (the Cardinals and Bears) survived into the modern era. In 1935, the league implemented its first fixed schedule, intending to ensure that each team played the same number of regular season games^note though heavy snow cancelled one game in late 1935 that was not made up; 1936 was the first season where all NFL teams played the same number of games.
  • From 1919 to 1934, the league was racially integrated, and black quarterbacks and even coaches were not unheard of due to the NFL being a largely informal, working-class organization with only semi-professional players that paled in comparison to the scrutiny placed on the much more popular Major League Baseball. Informal segregation took hold in the mid-1930s as part of the infamous "Gentleman's Agreement" spearheaded by notoriously racist Washington owner George Preston Marshall. Although no actual rules barring non-white players were ever officially instituted, de facto segregation continued until 1946, when the Cleveland Rams began their first season in Los Angeles, itself a less racially segregated city than it would become in the 1950s and '60s, with two African-American players from UCLA, Woody Strode and Kenny Washington (who earlier had been teammates on the UCLA Bruins with none other than Jackie Robinson).
  • The NFL did not adopt a playoff format to decide its championship until 1933, after the 1932 season concluded with the Chicago Bears (6-1-6) and Portsmouth Spartans (6-1-4) tied with an .857 winning percentage (ties still didn't count). At the time, the only tiebreaker the league had was in head-to-head games, but the Bears and Spartans had played to ties in both their games. The league had to break its own rules to schedule a deciding game between the two, and due to weather conditions, this playoff game was held indoors, at Chicago Stadium, resulting in several rule changes to adapt to the hastily-arranged and much smaller indoor field, making the game itself a case of early installment weirdness. The game also counted in the final regular-season standings, so Chicago's 9-0 win put Portsmouth (now 6-2-4, .750) in third place behind the Green Bay Packers (10-3-1, .769). From 1933 on, the Championship Game (and subsequent expanded postseason games) would not count in the final regular-season standings, and the NFL eventually implemented a more sophisticated tiebreaker system. Tie games still didn't count toward winning percentage until 1972, when they would be calculated as equivalent to half a win and half a loss for each team.
  • The overall shape of the playoffs has changed dramatically, too. For decades, due to the league's much smaller size, the Championship was the only postseason game, with only the division (and, later, conference) winners getting a chance at the league title with a few scattered tiebreaker games thrown in. In the '60s, the league experimented with a "Playoff Bowl" exhibition match for charity, though this typically is not counted as an actual playoff game since the teams were only competing for a "third place" trophy (Vince Lombardi famously called it "a shit bowl, a loser's bowl for losers"). For that reason, many older teams have decades-long playoff droughts on their record books even if they managed several good seasons in that span. The first Super Bowl was only the second postseason game for the 1966 season; the NFL added one additional round the following year, then added a "wild card" after the 1970 merger greatly expanded the total number of teams, giving the postseason its current tournament format (though rules regarding seeding and the number of wild cards have been continually tinkered with).
  • Several teams took years before adopting their now-standard color schemes and logos. This was especially notable in the early days of the AFL; since several of the league owners were minority owners of NFL teams, they often ported their old color scheme over to their own franchises: The Buffalo Bills sported the Detroit Lions' colors until their second season. The Oakland Raiders also didn't switch to their iconic silver-and-black uniforms until their third year.^note They sported a version of the Pittsburgh Steelers' black-and-gold. And the less said about the Denver Broncos' original yellow-and-brown eyesores, the better. The league encouraged the uniform changes as a way to look less like the NFL Jr.^note And because the Broncos unis were hideous.
  • Look at footage of NFL and AFL games from up to mid-1960s. Fans often stood right on the back end zone lines and could be seen rushing the field, mobbing the victorious teams, and tearing down the end zones after wins. Facilitating this was the fact that many stadiums simply lacked end zone seating, so fans were crammed into "standing room only" sections on both ends of the field. Such fan proximity would never be allowed today, for fan and player safety and to prevent fan interference. Indeed, modern stadiums are built so that fans can't easily reach the field from the cheaper seats and risk being banned from the stadium if they try.
  • Throughout its early history, the NFL had to fight of almost constant rival claimants to major league status, some of them even with more money and better teams. The AFL from the 1960s you may have heard of was the fourth Major League attempt by that name and racial integration as mentioned above happened in part because of pressure from the rival AAFC (which was a tad more enlightened on that issue). Several teams from rival leagues (including the Rams, Browns, and 49ers) joined the NFL prior to the merger, and some early NFL teams even jumped ship to other leagues. After the AFL-NFL merger was completed, the NFL became the undisputed king of pro football, and not a single franchise has even gotten close to entering the NFL through a rival league (though the USFL, particularly one guy you may have heard of, tried their very best).
  • The gameplay of the early NFL itself was radically different in recent years. Over the course of its history, the NFL has transformed from a game primarily based around running backs steadily grinding the ball down to the field to a passing league dependent on a star quarterback's throwing ability. Almost all current passing records are held by players who were active in the 21st century, and even many "second tier" quarterbacks today would be considered "great" if compared to earlier decades by passing statistics alone. The "two-minute drill" of a QB leading an end-of-game victory drive was considered an unheard of concept when Johnny Unitas came up with it basically on the fly, yet today there are several plays in the playbook exclusively reserved for that scenario, and Down to the Last Play has become the rule rather than the exception.
  • The draft is almost unrecognizable today compared to what it was in the '30s-'50s. The very first selection in the first draft did not play a single down of professional football - scouting was so bad at the time it did not even include asking the player in question about his post-college plans. Dedicated scouts did not become common until the '60s, leaving teams more or less dependent on reading newspapers, and total busts were far more common. Once NFL teams did start having the ability to observe and interview players, the draft became more about trying to keep players away from the AFL scouts than anything else. The loose "science" of modern drafting started to take shape in the '70s, but it wasn't a televised event that any fans were expected to pay close attention to until the '80s.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Winning a Super Bowl is the ultimate "happy ending" in the league, and while all winners have gone through some sort of hardship to get there, a few stand out as historically significant:
  • QB John Elway took his Broncos to three Super Bowls in the '80s, only to get blown out each time. Finally, in each of the final two years of his career ('97-'98), the Broncos won two Super Bowls. After the first, Broncos owner Pat Bowlen famously announced, when handing the Lombardi Trophy to Elway for the first time, the oft-replayed line that "this one's for John!"
  • As a team, the Saints were one of the league's most pathetic for the first three decades of their existence, during which their fans famously wore Brown Bag Masks and referred to the team as the "Ain'ts". They failed to make the playoffs for their first 20 seasons, failed to win one for 33, and then nearly moved out of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina forced them to play the entire 2005 season away from the city. In 2006, the brought in head coach Sean Payton and QB Drew Brees, who led the team to their first conference championship appearance and ensured that the team would stay in The Big Easy. Then, in 2009, they led the franchise to its first Super Bowl win.
• Egocentric Team Naming: The Browns are named after Paul Brown, their first and most successful head coach. Downplayed as Brown himself preferred "Panthers" as a team name, but a defunct team held the rights to the name at the time and refused to give them up.
• Every Year They Fizzle Out: Many teams, coaches, and players have developed this reputation throughout league history. Some of the more prominent examples:
  • From 1958-1963, the Giants made it to five of the six championship games; they lost each one.
  • The Houston Oilers won the first two AFL Championships in 1960-1. They haven't won another league title since. The Oilers never reached the Super Bowl, getting closest in two consecutive AFC Championships in the late '70s "Luv Ya Blue" era where they were stopped by the Steel Curtain Steelers. The team had an extended run of regular season success with Warren Moon (arguably the best QB to never play in a Super Bowl) in the late '80s and '90s, but seven straight playoff berths all flamed out in sometimes dramatic fashion before even reaching the conference championship (most notably surrendering a record 32-point lead against the Bills after the '92 season). It took changing their franchise name and market to finally reach the Big Game, with the newly-christened Tennessee Titans reaching the Super Bowl in their first year with the new name — they lost by a single yard and haven't returned since.
  • The Vikings made it to four Super Bowls in the late '60s and '70s only to lose them all; despite having one of the best franchise win records of any NFL team, these consistent winners in the regular season haven't managed a return to the Big Game since and have lost multiple playoff games by the margins of easy (but missed) field goals.
  • Following their loss in Super Bowl II, the Oakland Raiders reached eight of the next ten AFL/AFC Championships through the late '60s and '70s; they made it back to the Super Bowl only once (which they at least won, which largely helped erase the team and their coach John Madden's reputations as late-season chokers).
  • George Allen was a Hall of Fame coach for the L.A. Rams and Washington in the '60s and '70s, posted the fourth-best winning percentage in NFL history in the regular season (116-47-5, .712), never had a losing season, and took his team to playoff berths seven times. In every season save for 1972, his team lost their first playoff game; the one year he did make it past the first round, he managed to reach the Super Bowl but lost to the "perfect" Dolphins.
  • The Broncos under head coach Dan Reeves and QB John Elway made it to three Super Bowls in the '80s, only to lose every single one, including a Super Record 55-10 blowout loss to the 49ers. Elway eventually shook this in the late '90s by leading Denver to two Super Bowl wins before retiring. In the process, he ensured that Reeves would forever hold this reputation; his old coach led Denver's opponent, the Falcons, in Elway's final game.
  • Marty Schottenheimer was a beloved and successful head coach whose career spanned the '80s to the 2000s; despite visiting the playoffs 13 times, he only got past the first round four times and never made it to the Super Bowl. His Browns narrowly lost two AFC Championships back-to-back to the aforementioned Broncos, meaning that his teams choked against a team infamous for choking.
  • Dan Marino set just about every major regular season passing record during his career with the Miami Dolphins but only made it to one Super Bowl in which he lost. He is widely considered the best QB to never win a Super Bowl.
  • The Buffalo Bills set an NFL record by becoming the first team to make it to four straight Super Bowls in the early '90s... only to lose every. Single. One.
  • Peyton Manning is the former Trope Namer and developed this reputation starting in his college career which followed him into the NFL. Despite record-setting regular season performances and awards, he and the Colts fizzled out every year in the playoffs until finally breaking through to win Super Bowl XLI... only to lose their second and last Super Bowl appearance a few years later. When he moved to the Broncos as a free agent, he won Comeback Player of the Year in his first year, then won MVP with a record-setting performance in his second, but still failed to win a Super Bowl until his final year in Denver when, due to physical decline, he was much more a game manager for their elite defense.
  • Donovan McNabb is statistically the leading passer in Eagles history but is infamous for losing three straight NFC Championship games, the last two as home favorites. When he finally broke through and won his fourth NFC Championship appearance, he lost in the Super Bowl and went down in infamy for throwing up during the fourth quarter.
• Evil Wears Black: Downplayed in terms of actually being "evil", but the Raiders, whose primary color is black, have long had a reputation as the "bad boys" of the NFL with a number of historically dirty players. They are also, unsurprisingly, the league's all-time most penalized team.
• Eyepatch of Power: Present in the Raiders logo.
• Failed a Spot Check: Many trick plays rely on the opposing team falling into this trope. Some prime examples:
  • The ubiquitous "play-action" pass begins with the quarterback pretending to hand off the running back. The fake is usually blatantly obvious, but if it makes the defenders hesitate for even a moment, it can still be successful by slowing the pass rushers, giving the QB more time to throw the ball, and freezing the coverage, allowing a receiver to come open.
  • "Draw" plays are the opposite of a play-action pass, where the QB drops back like he is going to throw only to give the ball to the RB on a delayed hand-off.
  • One special teams trick play involves putting two return men back on opposite sides of the field before a punt. The return man on the opposite side of where the ball is actually headed will pretend to field it, drawing coverage, while the other return man will actually field it with an open field in front of him. The Bears became famous for this when they had legendary return man Devin Hester, whose mere presence on the field drew the opposing teams attention.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: A common criticism of Tim Tebow during his two year with the Denver Broncos. He managed to pull off a few fourth-quarter comebacks and even put together a winning streak, including a win against the defending champion Steelers during the playoffs... but his play as a quarterback, especially his long/slow throwing motion and lack of accuracy, was atrocious. Critics noted that his team wouldn't need the comebacks if Tebow played better during the first three quarters and his teammates, especially the defense, were to credit for much of the team's success while Tebow got all the credit due to this trope and Wolverine Publicity. Denver seemed to agree, trading Tebow away after signing the much more dependable Peyton Manning as a free agent.
• Fingore: A body part injured quite often. Some notable examples:
  • Dislocated fingers seem to happen at least once every game. The injured player usually heads to the sideline where his team's trainer pops it back in and the player quickly returns to action. The main exception is when it happens to a quarterback's throwing hand, where it can be a longer term injury due to affecting his grip on the ball.
  • Hall of Fame 49ers safety Ronnie Lott suffered an injury to his pinky finger in the 1985 season which would have required season-ending surgery to repair. Instead, he opted to have it partly amputated, allowing him to return to the field much sooner.
  • Hall of Fame linemen like Chuck Bednarik and Anthony Munoz are just some of the more prominent players to have pinky fingers that now bend outward at a 90-degree angle due to football injuries.
  • Pass rusher Jason Pierre-Paul, then of the Giants, suffered an injury during a July 4th celebration in 2015 that caused him to lose part of his thumb and two fingers. He was able to return, wearing a special glove to fit his mangled hand, playing well enough to help the Bucs win Super Bowl LV.
• Flawless Victory: To date, the '72 Dolphins are the only team in NFL history to complete a perfect regular and postseason. The '48 Browns had a perfect 15-0 season in the AAFC that's rarely mentioned outside of Cleveland, though that didn't have a playoff tournament, only a championship game.^note Unlike those from the AFL, the NFL does not formally recognize numbers and accomplishments from AAFC, though the Pro Football Hall of Fame does and the league doesn't make too big a deal out of its two surviving teams using those stats if they so choose. The Bears had a couple of pre-merger perfect regular seasons but lost in the championship game each time. The '07 Patriots completed the only 16-0 regular season but likewise lost in the Super Bowl that year.
• Flyover Country: The NFL's original power base was the Great Lakes region, with the teams who would become the Cardinals (then in Chicago), the Bears, the Packers, and the Lions being some of the league's oldest. Other early teams existed in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, but few survived the Great Depression. Ohio was another strong area for the early NFL and, though the Canton Bulldogs themselves did not make it, they are the reason the Pro Football Hall of Fame is located there.
• Follow the Leader: The NFL has a reputation as a "copycat" league for a reason. If one team starts using a particularly effective strategy or tactic, expect other teams to adopt and adapt it. Some particularly notable examples:
  • Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh developed what would come to be known as the "West Coast Offense" while the coordinator of the Cincinnati Bengals in the late '60s and '70s. He took it with him when he became head coach at Stanford in 1975, then back to the NFL when became head coach/GM of the 49ers in 1979. Utilizing a short, horizontal passing attack designed to allow receivers to gain "yards after catch" while employing a mobile QB who can roll out of the pocket for deeper pass attempts, he and QB Joe Montana executed it on their way to making the 49ers a four-time Super Bowl winning dynasty in the '80s. Nowadays, every offense in the NFL uses elements from it.
  • NFL teams will copy successful strategies and schemes from college football as well. To note:
    • The "Spread" offense dominated college football in the mid-late '00s^note though has existed in other forms dating back to the '50s, initially popularized by Urban Meyer at Utah and later Florida. It is typically run with 3-4 receivers to "spread" the defense horizontally across the field while the QB is in the shotgun with a RB at his side. Its simplistic reads (which could be thwarted by the NFL's more complex defensive schemes) and reliance on the QB also being a running threat (risking injury against the NFL's bigger, more athletic defenders) initially saw it painted as a college gimmick. Further, quarterback prospects who played in spread offenses in college were seen as particularly high risks of busting. Then the 2007 Patriots used elements of it to set numerous NFL records on their way to the first 16-0 regular season in NFL history. Helped along by player safety changes which added protections for quarterbacks and receivers, elements of the spread offense are now present in every offensive system in the league.
    • The early '10s saw another supposed "college gimmick" take hold and excel in the NFL: the "Read-Option". In this offense, the quarterback initiates a hand-off to the running back out of the shotgun where the QB then "reads" an intentionally unblocked defensive edge rusher. If that player "crashes in" to tackle the RB, the QB pulls the ball and carries it around the edge himself. If that player stays in place, the QB hands it to the RB for a run up the middle. Robert Griffin III excelled in this offense in college and then as a rookie with Washington in 2012, earning a playoff spot and an Offensive Rookie of the Year award. Many other teams began running similar plays thanks to Griffin's success, but as they always do, NFL defenses caught on and came up with counters. Griffin never approached that level of success again while suffering a series of injuries, while the play itself sees only limited use.
    • Following the success of the Read-Option, the "Run-Pass Option" made the jump from college (where it saw massive success) to the Pros and was a huge factor in the 2017 Eagles Super Bowl win. The play itself starts similarly to the Read-Option with the QB in the shotgun and a RB next to him. After taking the snap, he reads the coverage on a single receiver. If that receiver is open, the QB throws him the pass. If not, he hands the ball to the RB. Carson Wentz was well on his way to an MVP season in this offense before suffering a season-ending injury, then backup Nick Foles used it to finish the season and help the Eagles to their first Super Bowl win in franchise history. Again, many teams copied it, but defenses also soon caught up. It is still used by almost every team in the NFL, but is no longer the dominant force it once was.
    • In the late '10s, the "Air Raid" offense made the jump from college to the pros. It is an up-tempo, high volume passing attack that, like many of the above examples, takes advantage of less sophisticated college defensive schemes to dominate. Patrick Mahomes famously ran the offense in college at Texas Tech and the Chiefs used elements from it during his first two seasons of dominance. Meanwhile, his head coach Kliff Kingsbury went on to become the head coach of the Cardinals in 2019 and brought it there, where Kyler Murray won Offensive Rookie of the Year running it. By 2020, most NFL teams are using aspects of it as it continues to proliferate throughout college football as well.
• Football Hooligans:
  • Eagles fans (and Philly fans in general, regardless of sport) have this reputation. Picking fights with fans of the visiting team, cheering when opposing players are injured, throwing garbage including batteries at opposing players, pelting Santa Claus with snowballs... Hell, their former stadium (Veterans Stadium) had an operational courthouse and jail in the basement. The NFL actually takes this reputation into account when creating the schedule, typically trying to avoid scheduling the Eagles division rivals (especially the Cowboys) in the final month of the season when snow is likely. When the team finally won their first Super Bowl (LII), there was no shortage of celebratory rioting in the city. A notable exception came when Philadelphia hosted the 2017 Draft as, despite three days of festivities with 250,000 fans visiting, the police did not report making a single arrest.
  • "Raider Nation" is the AFC equivalent, with a particular reputation for thuggishness. In L.A. in particular, the team's distinctive silver and black colors are associated with gang violence, and Raider fans have been known to follow their team to nearby stadiums (San Francisco when in Oakland and San Diego when in L.A.), leading to special precautions being put in place ahead of Raider games.
• Forty-Niner: Naturally, San Francisco takes its team name from the historical figures.
• Fragile Speedster: Many track athletes with all-world speed have attempted to play in the NFL with varying degrees of success. Those that fail tend to fall more on the "fragile" part of the trope, being more prone to injury while also lacking physicality to be successful in the other aspects of their positions. Some especially notable examples:
  • "Bullet" Bob Hayes won Olympic gold medals before becoming one of the Dallas Cowboys' first stars; his exceptional mobility helped lead to the proliferation of the spread offense, as anyone who was just assigned to cover him were inevitably left in his dust. This adaptation limited his effectiveness and injuries brought his career to a close after a decade.
  • Olympic-qualified sprinter Willie Gault was selected by the Chicago Bears in the first round of the 1983 Draft out of Tennessee, he was the Bears leading receiver in their dominant '85 Super Bowl winning season.
  • Michael Bennett was another track star selected by the Vikings in first round of the 2001 Draft out of Wisconsin. He had one Pro Bowl season thanks to his elite speed but struggled to pick up other aspects of being an NFL RB while also suffering a string of injuries to end his career.
  • Devin Hester is the NFL's all-time leader in return touchdowns, being one of the greatest special teams stars of all time. Being the only recipient of a 100 "Speed" rating in Madden NFL history, he was drafted as a CB and later switched to WR, but his speed never translated to these other positions.
  • Robert Griffin III was selected #2 overall in 2012 by Washington after a Heisman-winning college career at Baylor. An athletic QB, he got off to a hot start, winning Offensive Rookie of the Year while leading Washington to the playoffs. Unfortunately, that is where the "fragile" part came into play when he suffered a knee injury in his first playoff game. He rushed his rehab trying to be ready for the start of the next season but struggled through additional injuries while NFL defenses adapted his play style.
  • John Ross is a WR selected by the Bengals in the first round of the 2017 Draft most famous for setting the Combine record with a 4.22 40-yard dash time. Ross struggled badly with drops and injuries as a pro and is now one of the bigger draft busts of his era.
• Friendly Rivalry: For all that fans and the media make of various rivalries throughout the league, they are almost always much more friendly in reality. A prime example was the rivalry between Tom Brady and Peyton Manning as the two vied for AFC dominance over the better part of two decades. They always spoke respectfully of each other and seemed to genuinely enjoy their match-ups.

G-P

• Game-Breaking Injury: Dozens of season-ending injuries are suffered by players across the league every year, in large part due to the physical nature of the sport. As such, it would fill up several pages to list them all out. Below are some of the more notable for their overall impact on NFL history:
  • Gale Sayers was a dynamic RB and return specialist for the Bears in the '60s. He burst onto the scene setting numerous rookie records, several of which still stand to this day, and won Offensive Rookie of the Year. After leading the league in rushing in his second season, he badly injured his right knee. He returned to lead the league in rushing again, winning Comeback Player of the Year, only to badly injure his left knee the following season. As reconstructive knee surgery was much more primitive during his era, Sayers was never able to return to form despite several more comeback attempts. He retired at 28 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame at age 34, the youngest person ever to be so honored.
  • After a dynastic run winning four Super Bowls in the '80s, Joe Montana suffered a serious elbow injury in the 1991 preseason that ultimately took two years to fully heal. During that time, he was replaced by an athletic QB best known as a draft bust for the moribund Buccaneers before coming to San Fran as as a backup. Said QB, Steve Young, had an MVP season playing in Montana's stead, leading to a controversy when Montana was ready to return. The rift split the locker room, the coaching staff, and even ownership before Montana requested a trade to resolve the situation. He went to the Chiefs and took them to an AFC Championship game appearance, while Young won another MVP and led the 49ers to a victory in Super Bowl XXIX.
  • Ki-Jana Carter was a RB selected #1 overall in the 1995 Draft out of Penn State by the Bengals after a dominant college career. He tore his ACL on the third carry of the preseason in his rookie year and never bounced back. He made several comeback attempts but suffered three more season-ending injuries before calling it a career. He was notably the last RB to be selected #1 overall; for all of the benefits a truly elite running back can offer an offense, injuries like these are both common and especially debilitating for frequently-tackled runners, making the use of draft or salary capital too big a risk for most teams to take.
  • In 2007, Tom Brady set numerous single-season passing records on his way to winning league MVP and putting up the league's only 16-0 regular season in history, ultimately falling short in the Super Bowl. In the very first game of the 2008 season, he suffered a torn ACL and missed the rest of the season, derailing any slim possibility of the Pats running it back for another attempt; they missed the playoffs that year, though Brady won Comeback Player of the Year after bouncing back and continued to dominate the league for years to come.
  • Peyton Manning started every game for the Colts from when they drafted him #1 overall in 1998 through the 2010 season, rewriting record books, winning league MVP four times, making two Super Bowls, and winning one (XLI). However, he underwent surgery in the 2011 offseason for a career-threatening neck injury and did not play that season, during which the Colts went 2-14 and "earned" the #1 overall pick of the 2012 Draft. Manning requested and was granted his release, while the Colts went on to draft elite draft prospect Andrew Luck as his successor. After one of the most hyped free agency tours in NFL history, Manning decided to sign with the Broncos. He won Comeback Player of the Year 2012, then led the highest scoring offense in NFL history on his way to another league MVP award and Super Bowl appearance in 2013. In the final year of his career, despite battling injuries, Manning returned for the post-season and guided Denver to a victory in Super Bowl 50 before retiring.
  • Andrew Luck himself led the Colts to the playoffs in each of his first three seasons despite taking a beating behind a sub-par offensive line. As holdover players from the previous regime moved on, the Colts were increasingly supported by the overworked Luck until injuries finally took their toll. After sitting out the entire 2017 season to recover, Luck returned in 2018, bringing the Colts back to the playoffs while winning Comeback Player of the Year. However, he aggravated another injury the following offseason and decided to retire at 29.
• Genius Bruiser: Despite football's reputation as a sport for "meatheads", success at the NFL level requires intelligence and long hours of study. While listing every single example would require a page of its own, some of the more notable examples are below:
  • Dan Fortmann, a Hall of Fame two-way guard for the Chicago Bears, was also his high school valedictorian and a straight-A pre-med student at Colgate when he was drafted in 1936 at the age of 19, the youngest ever draftee at the time. Fortmann played few games in his first four seasons because he was going to medical school at the University of Chicago, something Bears' owner-coach George Halas helped pay for on the condition that he eventually returned to play for the team. Fortmann, like most players of his era, saw football as a means to an end, but he appreciated Halas' trust in his abilities so much that, when he finished his classes, he led the Bears to three championships in his remaining four years on the team. After retiring from football and serving in WWII, he became the team physician for the L.A. Rams before becoming Chief of Staff at an L.A. hospital.
  • Alan Page, a Hall of Fame defensive end for the Vikings, practiced law after his playing days. He eventually became a Justice on Minnesota's Supreme Court for over 20 years, only leaving the bench because state law required him to retire upon reaching 70.
  • Myron Rolle was a 6'2", 215 lb safety from Florida State who was considered a potential first round pick for the 2009 Draft. He ultimately went in the 6th round of the 2010 Draft...because he took a year off to study on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. He ultimately never appeared in a regular season game after playing in the '10 and '11 seasons, but don't feel bad - he went on to become Doctor Myron Rolle, Neurosurgeon.
  • QB Andrew Luck almost certainly would have been the #1 overall pick of the 2011 Draft, for which he was eligible, but chose to remain in school at the prestigious Stanford University to graduate with a degree in architecture and engineering. He ultimately went #1 overall in 2012 to the Colts, putting up a great career that was cut short by injuries.
  • Laurent Duvernay-Tardiff, an offensive lineman, is a Montreal-area native who went to that city's McGill University, where he played offensive guard for the Canadian football team and was the consensus best player in Canada... all while practicing only once a week due to his medical studies. He was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs in 2014, and first made the roster and then established himself as a starter while continuing his medical studies during the offseason. He graduated from McGill's medical school in 2018; though he'll put a residency on hold until he's finished with his NFL career, he did opt-out of the 2020 season due to the COVID-19 Pandemic so he could assist in his home country.
• Glass Cannon:
  • There have been countless players who have dominated when they've been on the field, but struggled with injuries. Some historically prominent examples:
    • Bears RB Gale Sayers burst onto the NFL scene in the '60s, setting numerous rushing and kick return records, but suffered severe injuries to both knees which ultimately robbed him of his explosiveness. He retired at 28 and became the youngest player inducted into the Hall of Fame at 34.
    • Bob Sanders was a safety for the Colts in their mid-late '00s heyday. He won Defensive Player of the Year in 2007... the only year of his career in which he was fully healthy. Overall, in seven seasons in Indianapolis, Sanders played six or fewer games due to injury five times. Sanders' propensity for injuries reached memetic levels when, in a one-game preview for Madden NFL that involved the Colts, he rarely made it through the game uninjured, even though the quarters were shortened to four minutes.
  • High powered offenses, while impressive and fun to watch when working, can also fail spectacularly, especially if an opposing defense is able to harass their QB with a pass rush. The two highest scoring offenses in NFL history - the '07 Patriots and '13 Broncos - both failed miserably in the Super Bowl those years with the Patriots putting up only 14 points against the Giants and the Broncos only putting up 8 against the Seahawks.
  • On the flipside, hyper aggressive defenses can likewise fail in this fashion. Typically blitz-heavy, they leave their defensive backs in one-on-one coverage which can be exploited by the opposing passing attack. Notably, the only loss the '85 Bears and their all-time great defense suffered was a Monday Night Football game against Dan Marino and the Dolphins who took advantage in this exact fashion. More recently, this was the Achilles' Heel of Rex Ryan's Jets teams for the same reason.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Despite the high levels of trash talk taking place on the field, a number of players refuse to swear. Notably, long-time Chargers QB Philip Rivers, who had a very religious upbringing, refuses to curse and instead trash-talked with phrases like "Dag gum" and the like.
• Grandfather Clause:
  • The Green Bay Packers are a publicly owned franchise, an arrangement now banned by NFL rules. Packer stock has some pretty severe restrictions on it, and the team is operated as a not-for-profit company (legally, they are a for-profit company, but revenues that aren't being used to fund football operations are given to charity; unlike other types of stocks, Packers stockholders don't get returns on the stock). Fans of other NFL teams whose ownership is deemed incompetent often lament the fact that they can't band together and buy the team in a Packers-style arrangement.
  • Wearing face masks became mandatory in the late '60s, though several players who started play before then were grandfathered in to play without them. Kicker Garo Yepremian was the last NFL player to not wear a face mask, only adopting one partway through the 1966 season. In 2004, single bar face masks were banned with a similar grandfather clause in place. In this case, punter Scott Player was the last player to wear one, ending his career in 2009.
• Handicapped Badass: A number of players in league history have found success despite handicaps. Some notable examples:
  • Tom Dempsey was a Pro-Bowl kicker in the '70s who, due to a birth defect, did not have toes on his right foot. He wore a custom kicking shoe and is famous for making a then-record 63 yard field goal in 1970. Several other kickers would tie and later break his record, but Dempsey's feat remains notable due to his handicap. To this day, sports scientists debate whether his handicap and the shoe he wore to compensate (a modification now banned under league rules) made said kick possible.
  • Earl Campbell is a Hall of Fame RB most famous for his time with the Houston Oilers in the late '70s and early '80s, where won league MVP and a record-tying three Offensive Player of the Year awards. A power back with a brutal running style, it was discovered after his career was over that he suffered from spinal stenosis, a hardening of the spine that makes it more prone to severing. Any big hit could have left him paralyzed. When a player is diagnosed with this condition (as happened to the third Manning brother, Cooper, while in college), it typically ends his playing career due to the risk it brings in a contact sport. Campbell ran to the Hall of Fame in spite of it.
  • Shaquem Griffin became the first amputee player drafted into the NFL when the Seahawks selected him in the 5th round of the 2018 Draft. Born with a defect that prevented the fingers on his left hand from developing and causing immense pain, Griffin had it amputated as a child. Despite missing a hand, he had a dominant college career at UCF and a fantastic Combine performance which drew the NFL's attention. He currently plays on special teams and as a rotational edge rusher.
• Hard Head: Averted with vengeance. The NFL has had to change its rules due to research into head injuries in the late '00s and early '10s. The discovery of a previously-unknown type of dementia (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy or "CTE" for short) common among retired NFL players resulted in an increase in player fines and suspensions for unnecessary roughness, while also changing the standards for players to be allowed to return to the field after a head injury and advancements in helmet technology. Research suggests that the time it takes to recover from a concussion is may take weeks or months, and repeated concussions during that period may lead to CTE. Football culture has traditionally valued the ability to play through this type of injury; former Chicago Bears safety Doug Plank, for whom the "46" defense is named, used to speak of playing while so disoriented that he had to be guided to the correct sideline when leaving the field.
• Heads or Tails?:
  • A coin flip is used to determine possession at the start of the game. The away team calls the flip, then the winner can choose to receive the ball, kick the ball, defend a side of the field, or defer to the second half.
  • The NFL has long lists of tiebreakers for playoff spots and seeding. In the highly unlikely even that two teams are still tied after applying every tiebreaker, a coin flip is used to determine who it goes to.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: A common belief in the league's early days, but helmets became mainstream over the '30s. The 1940 NFL Championship game featured the last player to play without a helmet in league history. This trope then jumped to facemasks, but by the late '60s, all players were at least wearing a single bar (which some kickers and punters continued to wear until the 21st century).
• A Hero to His Hometown: A number of players in league history have been successful for their home town/state teams. To note some prominent examples:
  • Hall of Fame tackle and San Francisco native Bob St. Clair played in the same home field in high school, college, and the pros. He was even voted mayor of the neighboring Daly City and served his term while still an active player.
  • The Browns worked the rules regarding the NFL Draft and Supplemental Draft in order to land consensus top prospect and Cleveland native QB Bernie Kosar in the '85 Draft. They convinced Kosar to stay in school through the regular draft, then graduate early and declare for the Supplemental Draft. Then, through a complicated series of trades, they landed the #1 pick in that draft to take him. While the move was unpopular in league circles, Kosar became the Browns best QB since the merger, leading the team to three AFC Championship game appearances.
  • Jake Plummer was a quarterback at Arizona State where he was runner-up for the Heisman Trophy before being drafted by the Cardinals in 1997. His local hero status coupled with his gunslinger mentality and scrambling ability made him a fan favorite while he led the Cardinals to their first post-season victory in four decades. Plummer's teammate Pat Tillman had likewise played with him at Arizona State, one reason why his death from friendly fire while serving in Afghanistan shook the fanbase particularly hard.
  • Averted during the 2005 Draft, where Bay Area native QB Aaron Rodgers, who played collegiately at California, was the presumptive #1 overall pick to the 49ers. However, on draft day, the 49ers surprised the football world by taking Utah's Alex Smith instead. Rodgers slid all the way to pick #24 where the Packers ultimately selected him. He had the last laugh, however, as he embarked on a Hall of Fame worthy career including a Super Bowl while Smith was, at best, pretty good (with his best years coming after he left San Francisco).
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: The bonds between NFL teammates can run extremely deep. Some notable historic examples:
  • Running backs Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo both played for the Bears in the late '60s, becoming close friends and eventually roommates on the road, during an era where hotel room assignments were otherwise still segregated. Sadly, Piccolo passed away from cancer in 1970 at the age of 26. He and Sayers' friendship was featured in Brian's Song, a popular made-for-TV movie that debuted in 1971 with James Caan as Piccolo and Billy Dee Williams as Sayers.
  • Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski, who has caught more touchdown passes from Brady than anyone else despite only being around for about half of Brady's career. Their bond is so strong that, when Brady went to the Buccaneers, he convinced Gronk to come out of retirement and join him there, by way of a trade.
• Highly Specific Counterplay: Certain defensive schemes are rarely used save to counter very specific opposing offenses. Some notable examples:
  • The "mush rush" and "quarterback spy", often used in tandem, exist to combat especially mobile quarterbacks. In the former, the pass rushers don't actually attempt to go for the sack. Instead, they try to box in the quarterback to keep him from running. In the latter, a player (usually the middle linebacker but sometimes a safety if the QB is especially athletic) is assigned to cover the quarterback should he leave the pocket.
  • The "Prevent" defense only has two or three defensive linemen, while putting the other eight to nine defenders in coverage deep down the field and along the sidelines. This is only used when the opposing team needs to score a touchdown late in the game, essentially trading easy yardage up the middle of the field (which keeps the clock running) to prevent the offense from getting out of bounds (which stops the clock) or hitting a deep strike for the touchdown.
• High Turnover Rate:
  • NFL players in general. Depending on exactly how you measure the start and end of a player's career, the average NFL player only lasts 2-3 seasons, with the number of decade-spanning stars evened out by the countless players who struggle to make final rosters or are pushed out by injuries.
  • From their 1999 return to the league until the 2018 season, the Cleveland Browns have had 31 quarterbacks starting for them, by far the most. In comparison, the New England Patriots have had only 5 starting QBs in that same timespan (Drew Bledsoe, Tom Brady, Matt Cassel, Jimmy Garoppolo, and Jacoby Brissett - the latter three only in injury relief). In 2018, the Browns drafted Baker Mayfield #1 overall, who has successfully held onto the starting job ever since.
• Horny Vikings: The Minnesota Vikings have the horns painted on their helmets and their logo is a mustached, braided long-haired blond man with a horned helmet.
• I Can Still Fight!: The ability to play through pain and minor injuries is practically a job requirement. As listing every example would require a page of its own, here are some historically notable examples:
  • At 321 consecutive starts (including playoffs), QB Brett Favre holds the NFL record. During that span, he has played through, just to name some of the more signicant injuries: a separated non-throwing shoulder, sprains to both ankles, a stress fracture in his heel, a broken thumb on his throwing hand, and more concussions than anyone can count. His start streak is one of the few records considered truly unbreakable given the NFL's increased sensitivity to head injuries leading to a new concussion protocol. (The next closest active QB is Russell Wilson, with fewer than half of that number. Philip Rivers has the second longest at 252 games and retired at age 39. He would have needed to start every game for four more seasons to catch Favre.)
  • In 1979, Hall of Fame Rams DE Jack Youngblood suffered a broken fibula in the first game of the playoffs. He continued to play through the injury during the postseason, including the Rams Super Bowl XIV loss and even played in the Pro Bowl, an exhibition all-star game even non-injured players often skip.
• I'm Going to Disney World!: First said by Super Bowl XXI winning QB Phil Simms of the Giants, it has been repeated by a Super Bowl-winning player (usually the game's MVP) ever since.
• Impoverished Patrician: While still wildly rich by normal standards, NFL ownership has increasingly become a club of multi-billionaires in the 21st century. A few who are left out:
  • Bengals owner Mike Brown, son of legendary coach and team founder Paul Brown, is considered the "poorest" NFL owner by most sources. As such, he's been criticized for being one of the absolute cheapest owners in the league, rarely committing to expensive signings and refusing to invest in updating many of the Bengals' practice facilities. That said, Brown has his defenders as many former players have stated that Mike is a fairly nice man who simply lacks the temperament for the job, regularly refusing to fire employees who aren't putting up results on the field and letting go of stars seeking greener pastures without much of a fight.
  • Raiders owner Mark Davis, son of legendary owner/coach/AFL Commissioner Al Davis, is the other non-billionaire NFL owner. He has a reputation for being a Cloud Cuckoolander and boasts one of the most distinct appearances in the league thanks to his trademark ginger bowl cut. He also gained some notoriety during the 2018 Khalil Mack holdout/trade, where he gained his "impoverished" reputation. After paying $100+ million deals to both head coach Jon Gruden and QB Derek Carr, which typically involves placing future guaranteed money into escrow, there were reports that the Raiders could not (as in, did not have the liquid assets on-hand to comply with the NFL's rules regarding guaranteed money) afford to pay Mack his asking price, forcing a trade to Chicago.
• Inept Aptitude Test: A classic Combine activity was the (in)famous Wonderlic Test, a basic intelligence test taken by the participants. The test contained 50 questions which had to be be answered within 12 minutes. While the results were supposed to be confidential, they were almost always leaked. Offensive Linemen and Quarterbacks performed the best on average, while Wide Receivers and Running Backs generally performed the worst. Defensive players tended to be scattered in between. A perfect 50 was only ever been achieved once (WR/P Pat McInally in 1975). Harvard QB Ryan Fitzpatrick scored a 48 after completing the test in a record 9 minutes (and later scored a perfect 50 upon retaking the test). Draft bust QB Vince Young reportedly scored a 6 on the test, whose designer said that a score of 10 should be attainable by anyone who is literate. (Young was later retested and scored a 16.) In 2022, the NFL announced that it would no longer administer the controversial test.
• Indy Ploy: Many of the great scrambling quarterbacks in league history embody this idea. A play will be called in, they'll line up, snap the ball... And then the QB will scramble around off-script dodging pass rushers while either waiting for a receiver to come open to throw to or simply take off running. Some particularly famous examples:
  • "Scramblin' Fran" Tarkenton was one of the league's great quarterbacks of the '60s and '70s and, as his nickname suggests, went off script frequently. Starting his career with the expansion Vikings in 1961, conflicts with his coach about his scrambling tendencies saw him traded to the Giants in 1967. There, he developed as a passer and returned to the Vikings in 1972 as a dual threat at the position. He led the Vikings to three Super Bowl appearances, losing all three, and retired with most NFL career passing records.
  • During their time together with the Packers, Brett Favre and head coach Mike Holmgren had a Red Oni, Blue Oni relationship owing to Favre's scrambling and gunslinging tendencies. Holmgren would call in relatively conservative playcalls only to watch as Favre went off script, with usually positive results.
  • This has become a specialty of Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs in the new '20s. Agile with one of the strongest arms in NFL history, as well as possessing freakish ability to throw accurately while off-balance and from all sorts of arm angles, Mahomes has a chance to turn any play into a big gain by going off-script.
• In Name Only: Specifically averted with the Browns. When the team moved to Baltimore, the city of Cleveland successfully sued to keep the name and team history. The "new" team became the Ravens, while an expansion team was added three years later which is considered a continuation of the original Browns franchise including all records and awards.
• It's Personal: A number of players carry chips on their shoulders over early career slights that drive them to success. Some historically significant examples:
  • Being selected so late in the draft (6th round, #199 overall) still bothers Tom Brady. During interviews, when he is discussing that draft day and how it felt to sit with his family watching the TV and have round after round go by without being selected, his voice breaks, his eyes tear up, and it's difficult for him to talk about it.
  • Aaron Rodgers, considered the favorite to go #1 overall to his hometown 49ers in the 2005 Draft, instead endured one of the most embarrassing draft slides in history, sitting there on live TV for over three hours until finally being selected at #24 by the Packers. He's gotten the last laugh, however, winning a Super Bowl and three league MVP awards.
• It Will Never Catch On: Many of the NFL's most celebrated aspects were once ridiculed and expected to flop. To note:
  • The passing game, with a few exceptions, was an afterthought in the NFL's earliest days. Pounding the rock in the "three yards and a cloud of dust" style was the expectation, while "airing it out" was only used when a team was running out of time to catch up. With the advent of the much more pass-happy AFL in the '60s followed by its merger with the NFL, more and more teams began utilizing the passing game as their primary means of offensive attack. By the '90s, the NFL was firmly a "passing league" with only a few outlier teams still heavily favoring the ground game. Following rule changes in the mid-'00s, the passing game opened up even more.
  • Despite decades of success at the college level, particularly at HBCU schools, very few NFL teams were willing to give black quarterbacks a chance even after the league began to integrate at most other positions in the '50s. In 1978, the Buccaneers made Doug Williams the first black QB drafted in the 1st round. Later, he would become the first black QB to start and win a Super Bowl with Washington. His success opened the door for Hall of Famer Warren Moon (who previously went to the CFL in order to keep playing QB) and Randall Cunningham to excel at the position. Nowadays, around 1/4-1/3 of the starting quarterbacks in a given year are black, with them being selected regularly in the first round of the draft (including #1 overall with Michael Vick, Cam Newton, Jameis Winston, and Kyler Murray).
• Jackie Robinson Story: Much like Major League Baseball, the NFL had some black players in its earliest days (including Hall of Famer Fritz Pollard) before the infamous "Gentlemen's Agreement", led by the Washington's notoriously racist owner George Preston Marshall (just look at his former team name), came into play in 1933 in which NFL teams agreed not to sign black players. These are some notable examples of the players and teams who helped to break the NFL's color barrier:
  • In 1946, two black players signed with the L.A. Rams: RB Kenny Washington and WR Woody Strode, who were teammates with Robinson at UCLA signed with the Rams, who had just moved to L.A. from Cleveland. The terms of their lease agreement in L.A.'s Memorial Coliseum (which was co-owned by the state, county, and local government) demanded that the team integrate: however, neither player saw substantial playing time.
  • That same year, however, another two black players (FB/LB Marion Motley and DT Bill Willis) signed with the AAFC's Cleveland Browns (having played for coach Paul Brown during their WWII Navy services). Both players went on to Hall of Fame careers as the Browns dominated the AAFC, forcing other teams to integrate to even have a chance of staying competitive. The NFL began to follow suit even before they absorbed teams from the AAFC, and black players were fair game (though it took several years before teams started drafting black players rather than just signing them as free agents.
  • Marshall, whose team aggressively marketed to the Jim Crow South, held out and refused to sign a black player for Washington until 1962 when the US federal government (who owned the stadium where his team played) forced him to; his team was atrocious through most of that era, and the first black player that he attempted to draft refused to play for the team. Their first black player, WR Bobby Mitchell, had a Hall of Fame career.
  • While the league integrated over the '50s and '60s, teams were still reluctant to play black quarterbacks. Even those who experienced great success in college were typically asked to move to other positions when they came to the NFL. In 1968, college QB turned pro corner Marlin Briscoe was pressed into service as a rookie for the Broncos when the team lost their starting QB to injury and the backup played poorly. As the first black starting QB in modern NFL history, Briscoe played well, throwing 14 touchdowns, running for three more, and setting a then-rookie record for passing yardage in a single game. However, entering his second season, the team brought in an award-winning CFL QB to take over as starter and asked Briscoe to switch to another position. He refused, asked for his release, and was granted it, signing with the Bills where switched to WR while serving as the backup QB. He never against started at QB, but his place in history was secure.
  • In 1978, the Buccaneers made history when they made Doug Williams out of HBCU Grambling State the first black QB ever selected in the first round. Despite having some success with the young franchise, Williams was among the lowest paid quarterbacks in the league and decided to jump to the USFL in the early '80s. After that league folded, he signed as a backup with Washington and, after being promoted to starter, became the first black QB to start and win a Super Bowl (XXII).
  • In 2001, Michael Vick became the first black quarterback to be selected #1 overall in the NFL Draft. Though his career has been overshadowed by controversy, his historical significance remains.
  • On the coaching front, the then-Los Angeles Raiders made Art Shell (a Hall of Fame offensive tackle who played for the team from '68-'82) the first black head coach in modern NFL history.^note The aforementioned Fritz Pollard was a co-head coach of his team in the years before the Gentleman's Agreement.
  • In the front office, Hall of Fame TE Ozzie Newsome became the first black general manager when the Ravens named him to that position in 2002.
• Jack of All Stats:
  • In the league's early days, most players played in all three phases of the game. Over time, as positions grew more specialized and playbooks/schemes grew more complex, players typically focused on one position on offense or defense. A few of these "60 minute men" continued to play into the '60s (most famously Eagles C/LB Chuck Bednarik), but by the end of the decade, they were gone. A few continued to play a specialist position (kicker, punter, long snapper) into the '70s, but even these became specialized by the '80s. In modern times, a player may rarely moonlight on the opposite side of the ball (such as Hall of Fame CB Deion Sanders playing some WR in the '90s or a number of defensive players lining up at FB/TE in goal line situations), but it's hardly the full time role it once was.
  • Within certain positions, this is still a factor. A prime example are "three down" running backs who are equally proficient at running the ball, pass catching, and pass blocking; so named because they can remain on the field for all three offensive downs (rather than a specialist pass catcher/blocker coming in for 3rd and long passing situations).
• Kansas City Shuffle: Factors heavily into gameplanning. If one team goes into a game planning to keep doing what they've been doing all season with no adjustments, the other team is sure to counter them. So each team needs to have counters to potential counters... and so on it goes.
• Kicked Upstairs: A common means to remove power from general managers and other front office personnel without actually firing them, which usually means paying out the balance of their contract. A notable example is Eagles general manager Howie Roseman, who this happen to him in early 2015. He was given the title "Executive Vice President of Football Operations", because head coach Chip Kelly demanded the power to assemble his own roster and convinced team owner Jeffrey Lurie to oblige him. The team failed to perform anywhere close to expectations that season, and the players grew increasingly frustrated with Kelly and his methods. In late December, Kelly was fired, and Roseman was given his old job back but kept his "football operations" title. Roseman, for his part, views his year without power as a blessing in disguise, as he used what he learned to help the Eagles to greater success in subsequent seasons, culminating in their first Super Bowl in 2018.
• Kingmaker Scenario: Extremely common during the final week of the regular season, which starting in 2010, has featured exclusively divisional matchups. Teams A and B might be competing for the division title and thus, a guaranteed playoff berth. Team C, who has been eliminated from playoff contention but is playing Team A, can knock Team A out with a win and put Team B into the playoffs instead. Expect this to be played up whenever the two teams in this scenario are major rivals.
• Last of His Kind:
  • In the 1940 NFL Championship game, Bears end Dick Plasman became the last player to play in an NFL game without a helmet.
  • Retiring in 1962, Eagles center and linebacker Chuck Bednarik went down in history as the last "60 Minute Man", a player who started on both offense and defense.
  • In the 1966 season, Lions kicker Garo Yepremian was the last player to play without a facemask, adopting one later in the season.
  • Retiring after the 1986 season, Washington kicker Mark Moseley was the last "straight ahead" kicker in NFL history. All others have adopted the more accurate and harder to block "soccer style" kick, using the instep rather than the toes.
  • Also retiring in 1986 after an 18 year career, Hall of Fame WR Charlie Joiner was the last active player to have played in the AFL, spending his rookie season with the Oilers before the merger.
  • In 2006, punter Sean Landeta retired, the last active player to have played in the USFL.
  • With the induction of Jerry Kramer in 2018, kick returner Billy "White Shoes" Johnson is the only member of the NFL's 75th Anniversary team not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Kramer was the only non-special teams member of the team who had to wait to be inducted via the Veterans Committee.
• Legacy Character:
  • The Baltimore Ravens to the Baltimore Colts. While the actual Colts relocated to Indianapolis and retain all of the team history, both the city of Baltimore and many former Baltimore Colt players (including the legendary QB Johnny Unitas) adopted the Ravens as "their" team. The Ravens also inherited the Colts old marching band, the only NFL team to continue to use one.
  • The city of Cleveland sued to ensure that this was the case for the Browns when owner Art Modell moved the team to Baltimore to become the Ravens. Cleveland got to keep the team name and history, while the Ravens were officially a "new" team. When the Browns returned to the league three years later, they officially picked up the Browns legacy.
• Lightning Bruiser: The NFL has no shortage of players who are massive for their position, while also being extremely athletic. Some notable historical examples:
  • Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown was as large as most linemen in his playing days, while also being one of the fastest players on the field, and never missed a game. He led the league in rushing for eight of his nine seasons played and retired as the league's all time leading rusher. Brown averaged 104.3 yards per game and 5.2 yards per carry, both records for the position.
  • Hall of Fame defensive lineman Reggie White was listed at 6'5", 300 lbs, and ran an absurd 4.6 second 40 yard dash time. He retired with the most sacks in league history (still ranking second in that category).
  • Rob Gronkowski was one of the best tight ends of the new '10s, having size (6'6", 265 lbs) like that of a typically less athletic blocking TE while possessing athleticism closer to that of a wide receiver. He dominated the decade, including setting the single season record for touchdowns by a TE with 17 in 2011.
• Living Legend: Any of Hall of Fame caliber Long Runner players eventually become this if they continue to play well into old age. Some particularly notable examples:
  • The "Grand Old Man", George Blanda, is the oldest person to ever play pro football at age 48 in his final season. His longevity was famously lampshaded by Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt after a 1970 game in which his last-second field goal salvaged a tie for the Raiders. Hunt quipped, "Why, this George Blanda is as good as his father, who used to play for Houston."
  • All-time league leading receiver Jerry Rice played into his early 40s, the only receiver in league history to do so and even put up a 1,000 yard season at 40. He stated that he someday wanted to face a corner who hadn't been born before he started playing in the NFL but never got the opportunity.
  • By the end of his storied career, Brett Favre was a literal grandpa, being the only known person to play in the NFL while having a grandchild.
  • Tom Brady continues to play well into his 40s, even winning a Super Bowl at age 43 and becoming a living multi-generational legend. In 2020, his Buccaneers drafted safety Antoine Winfield Jr., whose father played against Brady early in his career. If he plays another year or two (which seems likely), it is actually possible that he will be on the field with a player who wasn't born when he started in the NFL.
• Load-Bearing Boss: There have been a number of players who've been lost, either to injury or off-field reasons, only to see their teams completely collapse without them. When QB Michael Vick was arrested for dog fighting charges ahead of the 2007 season, the Falcons bottomed out without him, going 4-12. Similarly, after nine straight playoff seasons with Peyton Manning at QB, the Colts collapsed to 2-14 in 2011 when Manning was lost for the season due to a neck injury. After leading the team to six Super Bowl victories over 20 seasons, the Patriots fell to 7-9, their first losing record of the 21st century, after Tom Brady left as a free agent.
• Long-Runners:
  • The league itself is over 100 years old, with three teams (the Cardinals, Bears, and Packers) being even older, having started in other professional football leagues before joining the NFL (the Cardinals and Bears as founding members).
  • Due to the physical toll the game of football takes on one's body, any non-specialists who play 15 or more years qualify. Tom Brady is sitting pretty going on his 21st year in the league. Brett Favre played for 20 seasons, starting an NFL record 321 consecutive games along the way. Though exclusively a kicker by the end, Hall of Famer George Blanda started off as a QB and became the oldest man to play professional football at 48 in his final year after a record 26 seasons in the league.
• Loophole Abuse: Creatively bending the roles is not only accepted but expected. There's a reason a common saying around the NFL is "if you aren't cheating, you aren't trying". When the abuse is too unbalancing, expect a quick Obvious Rule Patch. Some prominent examples:
  • Bears founder (and initially player, coach, and long-time owner) George Halas found plenty of ways to bend the league's rules in its early days. Some notable cases:
    • He popularized the still-in-use idea of signing players recently cut by teams he was about to play in order to get intel on their schemes and game plans.
    • He would annoy visiting teams by placing towels that were too small or had holes cut in them in the visiting locker room. He'd also have the hot water turned off and put itching powder in their soap.
    • He had a dog trained to run onto the field, which would stop the game until the dog was removed, essentially giving his team an extra timeout.
  • Browns legendary coach and namesake Paul Brown also got in on the loophole action:
    • In 1956, he had a radio receiver installed in QB George Ratterman's helmet, famously stating "it's not cheating unless someone puts in a rule." The NFL did put in a rule in-season, though decades later, helmet radios are now standard equipment.
    • To get around roster limits, he had team owner Arthur McBride sign players who did not make the team but who Brown wanted to keep in reserve onto the payroll of his taxi company, giving them employment while keeping them away from other teams. The NFL didn't officially recognize these "taxi squads", but eventually allowed for modern "practice squads" in 1977 based on this practice.
  • The "Holy Roller" game between the Raiders and Chargers in 1978 featured abuse of the rules governing fumbles and batting a loose ball. With 10 seconds left in the game, the Raiders had possession at the Chargers 14-yard line, trailing 20-14. Raiders QB Ken Stabler found himself about to be sacked and fumbled the ball forward. Raiders RB Pete Banaszak appeared to try to recover the ball on the 12-yard line but could not keep his footing and pitched the ball with both hands even closer to the end zone. Raiders TE Dave Casper was the next player to reach the ball but he also evidently could not get a handle on it. He batted and kicked the ball into the end zone, where he fell on it for the game-tying touchdown as time ran out. During the play, the game officials ruled that Banaszak and Casper's actions were legal because it was impossible to determine if Stabler intentionally fumbled the ball forward (which, if it was intentional, would have been considered a forward pass and the play would be considered dead when the ball hit the ground) or if the players batted the ball forward (which is—and was—illegal in this case; the penalty would have negated the score). This led to a patch dramatically limiting what offensive players can do in terms of recovering fumbles. Stabler, Banaszak, and Casper all admitted after the fact that they had indeed deliberately fumbled and batted the ball forward in desperation to win by any means. The NFL closed this loophole the following season. Ever since, any fumble by the offense in the last two minutes of a half or on fourth down at any time in the game, can only be advanced by the player who fumbled. A recovery by any other offensive player which results in an advance of the ball causes the ball to be returned to the spot of the fumble.
  • At the time of the infamous "Snowplow Game" in 1982 between the Dolphins and the Patriots, there really wasn't a rule saying that you couldn't plow a section of the field in football before a field goal attempt. Needless to say, after the game, there is one. Since the rule went into place, members of the kicking team will kick snow out of the way and stomp snow down before lining up for the snap, which is legal.
  • When the Baltimore Colts moved the team out of the city on March 29, 1984, they did it at 2:00 AM by loading everything the team had into fifteen moving vans and bolting for Indianapolis. The reason was that the Maryland Senate had passed an "eminent domain" bill two days prior that would have allowed the city of Baltimore to seize the Colts franchise, forcing them to stay. Indeed, the Maryland House of Delegates also passed the bill that day and Governor Harry Hughs signed it into law, but since the Colts were gone by the time the bill was signed, Baltimore could not enforce it.
  • Due to the impending expiration of the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the NFL and the Players Association, the 2010 season was played without a salary cap. Dallas and Washington signed several free agent players that year, paying them huge up-front bonuses which went on the books as 2010 salary, while the remaining years (when they expected the salary cap to return) were much smaller payments. The NFL found this abuse to go too far and stripped each team of draft picks as punishment.
  • In 2019, Titans head coach Mike Vrabel took advantage of rules surrounding clock stoppages to help his team. These usually include exploiting a loophole in the rules regarding penalties and clock stoppages. For example, with more than four minutes left to play in the second half, a Delay of Game penalty does not stop the game clock but does reset the play clock, which is good for the team protecting the lead as they can they waste 40 more seconds of game time. This is typically done before a punt, where the yardage loss of the penalty doesn't matter as much. However, three Delay of Game penalties in a row draws an Unsportsmanlike Conduct penalty, which does stop the clock. Vrabel instead ordered his team to intentionally draw a False Start penalty after two Delay of Game penalties, breaking them up while still keeping the game clock moving. Vrabel also pulled off a similarly underhanded tactic on the other side of the ball when he intentionally sent a 12th defender onto the field prior to an opponent's punt, drawing a penalty and stopping the clock when his team was down, saving about 40 seconds of game clock for his team's comeback attempt. These tactics have since gained the nickname "Vrabeling".
  • In order to keep kickers from intentionally sending a kickoff out of bounds to prevent a big return, the rules state that if the kick goes out of bounds, the ball is automatically spotted at the 40-yard line, and due to the way NFL rules work, if the first receiver to touch the ball is out of bounds, it's considered an out of bounds kick. This makes sense when the ball is caught out of the air, but a few savvy kick returners have figured out that the way the rule is written means also applies if a receiver who is standing out of bounds reaches onto the field of play and downs a ball that's already come to rest on the field, making the play an out of bounds kick despite the fact that the ball clearly did not go out of bounds and wasn't on course to. Incredibly, despite being blatantly exploited several times by savvy/well-coached players, the loophole has yet to be patched.
  • The NFL has several rules to cover "Palpably Unfair Acts", which serves as a Rule Zero when something blatantly unfair happens that isn't covered by the rules (or if applying the rules strictly would still greatly benefit the offending team). Naturally it isn't applied often. Amusingly, the first time someone ran off the sidelines to tackle a runner, everyone agreed that the referee could award a touchdown even though the rule didn't officially exist yet. Under the current rules, the referee can award anything he deems necessary to negate the advantage a team gained by cheating overt enough to merit a "Palpably Unfair Act" penalty, up to and including declaring the offending team to have forfeited.
• Losing the Team Spirit: The Lions, perennially one of the worst teams in the league since the merger and the only NFC team who has failed to make it to a Super Bowl, have an unfortunate habit of sucking the "team spirit" out of the few great players they do have. Most infamously, Hall of Famers RB Barry Sanders and WR Calvin Johnson retired in the prime of their careers, tired of sacrificing their bodies for a team that was, even with their elite performances, a borderline playoff contender at best. QB Matt Stafford, who the Lions selected #1 overall in 2009 after putting up the first 0-16 season in NFL history, made similar comments about the organization just prior to his trade to the Rams in 2021.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • A coin flip takes place before kickoff of every game. The visiting team "calls it" and the team who wins the flip gets a choice between receiving, kicking, choosing a side of the field to defend, or deferring their choice until the second half. Teams almost always choose to receive or defer, with choosing a side of the field only coming into play during a game severely impacted by weather. More critically, a coin flip also happens at the start of overtime. If the team who wins the flip receives the ball and scores a TD, the other team's offense will not get a chance. This notably happened during the '18-'19 AFC Championship between the Pats and Chiefs, with the Pats winning on the opening drive of OT and denying the powerful Chiefs offense a chance to respond.
  • The NFL has 11 different tiebreakers for determining playoff teams and seeding. In the event that two teams are still tied after applying them all, a coin flip would be used. This has never happened but is theoretically possible.
  • When it comes to Draft order, "strength of schedule" (combined win/loss percentage of the teams they played) is the only tiebreaker. If two teams have the same record and strength of schedule, a coin flip is used to determine the order. This happens once every few years including, most notably, to determine the #1 overall pick of the 1970 Draft between the Steelers and Bears. The Steelers won the flip, selected the consensus #1 prospect in QB Terry Bradshaw, and proceeded to win four Super Bowls by the end of the decade.
• Made of Iron: Naturally, in such a physically demanding sport, many of the all-time greats with lengthy careers have played through injuries of varying severity. Brett Favre is one of the most famous for doing this on his way to an NFL record 321 straight starts, including most prominently a broken thumb of his throwing hand. Not only did he play with the injury, but he continued to play well.
• Magikarp Power: NFL teams frequently draft or sign highly athletic players with limited (and sometimes no) on-field football experience, hoping to develop them. Far more often than not, these players flame out before accomplishing anything on the football field, but when it works out, the results can be spectacular. Olympic gold medalist sprinter "Bullet" Bob Hayes, Olympic qualified sprinter Willie Gault, and college basketball players Cornell Green and Antonio Gates all had exceptional NFL careers. Aussie Rules football player Jarryd Hayne and rugby player Jordan Mailata saw some NFL success despite having not played American-style football previously.
• Magnetic Hero: Nearly any elite quarterback qualifies. His team will often use his mere presence to recruit free agents and sometimes even involve him in the process to get them to sign. One of the most prominent examples is Tom Brady when he joined the Buccaneers: He convinced former teammate Rob Gronkowski to come out of retirement to join him, as well as free agent Antonio Brown. Following the team's Super Bowl LV victory, the Bucs became the first team of the free agency era to return all 22 starters for the next season. Several were free agents who could have signed elsewhere for more money but were eager to return to attempt to win another Super Bowl with the QB who won more than any single franchise.
• Manly Tears: Plenty, which can be surprising for a stereotypically "macho" sport. After winning the Super Bowl, a good number of players and even some coaches will be in tears on the sideline. Likewise, these can be seen after breaking a major record (such as Emmitt Smith surpassing the beloved Walter Payton to become the league's all-time rushing leader), after announcing retirement, or during Hall of Fame induction. Famously, Made of Iron Determinator Brett Favre broke down on the sideline after a 2003 Monday Night Football blowout of the Raiders in which he threw four TD passes with a broken thumb on his throwing hand, a day after his father passed away.
• Medal of Dishonor:
  • The Buccaneers, despite being two-time Super Bowl champions, have the worst lifetime winning percentage not just in the NFL, but out of any team in the four major North American sports. Part of this is due to going 0-14 in their first season, then lost the first 12 games of their second season as well for the longest losing streak in NFL history: they've been digging themselves out of that hole ever since, and even two Super Bowl wins have left them far behind.
  • In 2008, the Lions became the first team to go winless in a 16-game season. The 2017 Browns later matched this feat. Their head coaches, Rod Marinelli and Hue Jackson (respectively), have never gotten serious consideration for another head coaching job after (and, in the case of Jackson, struggled to find another coaching position in the NFL at all.)
• Mentor Archetype: Most teams with young, hopeful franchise quarterbacks will sign a veteran backup in this vein, often outright calling him a "mentor". The veteran will share his knowledge and experience with the youngster, be it in the film room, on the practice field, or even on the sidelines during games, essentially acting as a coach that takes a roster spot. Josh McCown and Chase Daniel are prominent recent examples, spending the bulk of their lengthy careers as backups. This can be subverted when the "mentor" quarterback is established as a starter and the younger QB is his expected replacement. Brett Favre, Joe Flacco, and Aaron Rodgers are somewhat infamous for not mentoring in this situation when their teams drafted Aaron Rodgers, Lamar Jackson, and Jordan Love (respectively) as replacements.
• Middle Name Basis:
  • Hall of Fame QB Steve Young's full name is Jon Steven Young.
  • QB Matthew Stafford's full name is John Matthew Stafford.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • The NFL has celebrated every quarter-century anniversary, with its 100th anniversary in 2019 as its largest season-long celebration to date. It kicked the season off with the Chicago Bears (the only team to play in every season of league play) hosting the Green Bay Packers in the league's longest-running rivalry. Additionally, the league scheduled a weekly game honoring landmark moments in NFL history. The Hall of Fame also announced a special 15-member "Centennial Class" of Hall inductees alongside the normal four- to eight-member induction class.
  • Teams frequently celebrate milestone anniversaries since their founding, often wearing uniform patches, helmet stickers, and/or throwback uniforms during that season. Being older than the NFL itself, the Cardinals, Bears, and Packers all celebrated centennial anniversaries before the league did.
  • The NFL celebrated the 50th Super Bowl with gold NFL logos and the 50-yard markers on every field^note except Oakland, where it conflicted with the MLB's Oakland Athletics who shared their stadium being painted in gold. They also referred to Super Bowl 50 with Arabic numbers instead of Roman, as "L" (the Roman numeral for 50) is often used to represent losers and wouldn't look good for a logo for the sport's biggest championship.
• Miracle Rally: Another trope which seems to happen at least once every week. It is officially tracked by the stat "4th quarter comebacks". John Elway was one of the most famous quarterbacks in terms of leading these, retiring with the most in NFL history. He has since been surpassed by several others, with Tom Brady now being the all-time leader in the statistic, though in large part through his sheer longevity^note Other quarterbacks still have more comebacks per game played. It is also something of a double-edged statistic, as detractors will state that, if the QB played better in the first three quarters, he wouldn't need to lead a comeback in the 4th.
• Mirror Match: When two teams using the same system/scheme face off, often because one of their coaches previously worked under the other; one of the easiest ways to get hired as a head coach is to be an assistant to one that's seen success, resulting in expansive "coaching trees" that often fill the league. In the 2020 season, nearly 1/3 of the league had offenses where the playcaller worked under Kyle Shanahan or Sean McVay at some point (the duo working together in Washington from 2010-2013) leading some familiar looking offensive schemes.
• Missing the Good Stuff: The Heidi Game. In 1968, NBC switched away from the final minutes of the AFL matchup between the Oakland Raiders and New York Jets in order to show broadcast the television film Heidi.^note Today this sounds like a stupid reason to pre-empt a football game, but it was a different time. Football, particularly on the professional level, was still considered a niche sport, while Heidi was a major ratings draw for NBC. The network aired Heidi just once a year; since there were three networks and no such thing as home video, families had planned their evening around the film because it was their only chance to see it all year. Additionally, watch company Timex had purchased the entire broadcast of Heidi and NBC would've been in trouble had they not cut away from the game. Oakland scored two touchdowns in the final minute to pull off a comeback victory, which fans at home did not get to see. The resulting uproar from enraged football fans, which would put many instances of internet drama to shame, resulted in new policies being adopted and signaled the arrival of pro football as must-watch television. Nowadays, a network will never cut away from a game before it is finished. Unless a major breaking-news event like an assassination or a war beginning happens, TV viewers will see the entire game. (As it turns out, fans watching the "Heidi Game", anticipating that the game could be interrupted, called NBC en masse before the movie was due to start. NBC executives felt likewise and made a late decision to postpone the film but couldn't contact the broadcast control room to deliver their orders because fans had jammed the phone lines.)
• Mundane Made Awesome: For the first 50+ years of its existence, the NFL Draft was a simple meeting of team representatives to select incoming college players. ESPN started televising it in 1979, with analyst Mel Kiper Jr. as the star of the show. It grew massively throughout the '90s into a major television production, and by the '00s the day of the first round was putting up ratings numbers similar to other league's postseason games. In the mid-'10s, the league took it from its traditional home in New York City and has cities bid to host it similar to the Super Bowl, turning it into a massive live event as well.
• My Hero, Zero: Hall of Fame Raiders center Jim Otto wore the number "00". While not a valid number in the NFL, the Raiders started in the AFL and Otto was allowed to keep it when the leagues merged as a Grandfather Clause.
• Nerves of Steel: Practically a job requirement for quarterbacks and kickers. For the latter, Adam Vinatieri may be the most shining example, winning four Super Bowls with the first three coming by margins of three points and generally being unshakable in any clutch kicking situation.
• New Rules as the Plot Demands: While generally not "new" rules written on the fly, the NFL has an outright byzantine rule book, including many obscure rules which only come into play once every few decades and others covering highly improbable situations that likely will never happen. Average fans have likely never seen half of what is in the NFL rulebook come into play, and some are so rare that even many coaches are unaware of them until they happen. Adding to the complexity is that human referees are supposed to take these obscure rules into account along with the general vagueness of how many rules are written coupled with the limitations of the review system. Some notable historic examples of this coming into play:
  • The "Tuck Rule" helped to launch Tom Brady's career and the Patriots dynasty. Under the rules at the time, any time the quarterback's throwing arm is moving forward and he loses the ball, it's considered an incomplete pass, even if he's clearly "tucking" it into his body to brace for a hit. Brady lost the ball in this fashion in an AFC Divisional Round playoff game against the Oakland Raiders in 2001. Officials initially ruled it a fumble recovered by the Raiders, but it was overturned on review thanks to the then-obscure "Tuck Rule". The NFL repealed this rule in 2013, making it so that the quarterback's arm has to be moving in a clear "throwing motion" or else it is a fumble. The "empty hand" rule is another clarification that differentiates a fumble and an incomplete pass depending on when the QB loses "control" of the football.
  • Titans head coach Mike Vrabel has gained some infamy as a prominent Rules Lawyer, using technically legal though rather underhanded tactics that became known as "Vrabeling", taking particular advantage of obscure rules governing clock stoppages late in games.
  • Whenever there is a major injury as a result of a technically legal (at the time) but brutal hit, the NFL has typically added or changed the rules soon after to make it illegal in the future. A prominent example happened in the 2005 playoffs when Bengals QB Carson Palmer suffered a torn ACL after a defender hit him low while in the pocket. A rule change soon followed which made below-knee hits to quarterbacks a "Roughing the Passer" penalty. When something similar happened to Tom Brady in 2008, causing him to suffer a torn ACL, the rule was updated to prevent defensive players already on the ground from lunging at the QB below the knee. Similarly, Aaron Rodgers suffered a broken collarbone in 2017 when he was tackled by a defender outside of the pocket, where the defender fell with his full body weight onto Rodgers. A more controversial rule change was made after which penalized defenders from falling with their "body weight" onto the QB. It became nearly impossible to officiate consistently, so the NFL relaxed the rule in 2019, now only calling it in egregious cases.
  • After his Colts team suffered yet another playoff defeat at the hands of the Patriots and their physical defense in 2005, GM Bill Polian, then head of the NFL's Competition Committee which drafts new rules, used his position to reinforce rules that were technically on the books but rarely called regarding illegal contact from defenders on receivers more than five yards down the field. Combined with other rule changes in the name of player safety to protect "defenseless receivers" from hard hits, this helped to usher in the NFL's modern pass-happy era.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • Neither the New York Jets nor the New York Giants of the NFL play in New York City. They don't even play in New York state. Their stadium (which they share, adding additional awkwardness) is in New Jersey.
  • The 49ers no longer play in San Francisco, instead playing in Santa Clara (about 50 miles south) since 2014.
• No-Respect Guy: There have been a number of players in league history who, despite excellent play, do not garner near the respect or adulation as comparable players. To note some prominent examples:
  • Ken Anderson was the quarterback of the Bengals throughout the '70s and into the '80s, setting many of their franchise career passing records along the way. He won league MVP in '81 and took the franchise to its first Super Bowl appearance the next year. Despite all of his accomplishments, he has long been excluded from even consideration for the Hall of Fame despite having better numbers, more accolades, and more championship appearances than many other QBs enshrined in Canton (which may or may not have to do with him playing for an unglamorous small-market team).
  • Donovan McNabb was selected #2 overall in the '99 Draft by the Eagles and the lack of respect started immediately, as Philly fans in attendance soundly booed his selection as they preferred Heisman-winning RB Ricky Williams. In 11 years with the team, he took them to a Super Bowl appearance, five NFC championship appearances, and set most - if not all - of their franchise passing records. This amounted to the fans booing him at every opportunity and his name being brought up every offseason when it came trade time.
  • Come the late '10s, the league's "no respect" mantle moved to Bears QB Jay Cutler. In terms of starts, wins, and statistics, Cutler is arguably the best overall quarterback the Bears have had since Sid Luckman in the 1940s, but you wouldn't guess it by listening to the fans and media. The Bears had one of the worst offensive lines in the league since Cutler joined the team, which leads to him being amongst the most sacked (and injured) quarterbacks in the league in a given year. He was injured in the 2010 NFC Championship game and did not return in the 2nd half. The resulting backlash from other players and the media questioning his toughness is something he may never live down. (Nevermind the fact that he had a legitimate MCL sprain and was benched on the orders of his coaches.)
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: The NCAA has four levels of college football, ranging from the largest and most powerful programs at the top (Football Bowl Subdivision or "FBS"), the "Football Championship Subdivision" below that, then the even smaller Division II, and finally Division III which doesn't even offer sports scholarships.^note Below that are junior colleges, part of the NJCAA, and NAIA schools, which are not part of the NCAA but the level of player is roughly equivalent to D-III. Yes, some players from these levels have been drafted by NFL teams. NFL teams naturally scout all of these levels of play and, every year, at least a few players from the lower levels are drafted or signed as undrafted free agents into the league. Whenever a player from one of these lower divisions is being considered with a high draft pick, this trope comes into play. How much of that player's success was due to having such a talent advantage over their opponents? Results have been fairly mixed, with some major success stories (such as Hall of Fame corner Darrell Green who was drafted in the 1st round out of a D-II school, while Pro Bowl Steve McNair and Carson Wentz were top three overall picks out of FCS schools).
• Not the Intended Use: Timeouts are typically used to stop the clock late in the half and avoid disadvantageous situations, like not having enough players on the field or too many. In the '90s, then-Broncos coach Mike Shanahan started using them to "ice" the opposing kicker before key field goal attempts, forcing them to do it again. It's debatable whether the tactic actually works and some kickers are even on record saying they like it since it gives them a free "practice kick" before their actual attempt. Fans, most other players, and even a good number of coaches frown on the tactic and the league has looked into banning the practice on a number of occasions, but it remains legal.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Many of the examples under Loophole Abuse have been patched after it was determined that the "abuse" was too unbalancing.
  • In the '70s, the NFL had to make a new pass interference rule, dubbed the "Mel Blount Rule" after the Steelers CB, to stop defensive backs from mugging opposing receivers five yards past the line of scrimmage. This rule was reinforced in the mid-'00s, leading to the wide-open passing games seen in the NFL today.
  • Speaking of pass interference, the way that a penalty is assessed for defensive pass interference is also a case of this, although whether it was in response to an actual case of abuse or whether the rule makers simply anticipated and patched a possible loophole in advance is not clear. If a defensive player commits pass interference, the offense gets a first down at the spot where the interference occurred (if the penalty occurs in the end zone, it's placed on the one-yard line), because if it was a set number of yards, the defense might decide it was worth, for instance, a 15-yard penalty (the penalty for this foul in many other leagues) to prevent a reception that would pick up significantly more than 15 yards. By placing the ball at the spot of the foul, the NFL removes any such incentive.
  • The "Salata Rule"^note Named after Paul Salata, the man behind the idea of Mr. Irrelevant, introduced in 1979, prevents the penultimate team in the draft from passing in an attempt to get the final pick. Introduced after the Rams, interested in the extra publicity that choosing "Mr. Irrelevant" brings, passed on their pick so the Steelers would inherit their place and choose first. The Steelers, also interested in the extra publicity, subsequently did the same. This continued until the NFL commissioner forced them to make their picks in their original spots, and turned it into an official rule shortly afterwards.
  • The NFL banned certain types of hits to reduce the amount of injuries to players:
    • Deacon Jones Rule: The head slap, the Signature Move of the eponymous Rams defensive lineman, was made illegal.
    • Roy Williams Rule: The horse-collar tackle, named after the Cowboys safety who victimized several ball carriers with the move, was banned.
    • Carson Palmer Rule: Named after the former Bengals QB, defenders can't hit the passer's knees or lower legs unless it's coming off a block. The Palmer Rule was later revised in 2009, which stated that defenders on the ground can't lunge or dive at the passer's knees/lower legs (the Tom Brady Rule).
    • Hines Ward Rule: Blocking rules were implemented to keep players from injuring people with blindside blocks to the upper chest/head area after the eponymous Steelers WR racked up an impressive body count doing this, including knocking Ravens safety Ed Reed out cold and breaking the jaw of Bengals linebacker Keith Rivers.
  • After Steelers running back Jerome Bettis botched a coin toss call in the 1998 Thanksgiving game against the Lions (which resulted in the Steelers losing that game in overtime), the NFL passed the Jerome Bettis Rule the following week, in which the visiting team has to make the call before the coin is flipped.
  • During the 2012 Thanksgiving game between the Texans and Lions, Texans running back Justin Forsett got up after being tackled and continued to run for a touchdown. Lions head coach Jim Schwartz threw a challenge flag during the play, as replays showed that Forsett's knee had touched the ground. Unfortunately for the Lions, it is a penalty to challenge plays that are automatically reviewed, including all scoring plays. Throwing the flag resulted in a penalty that cancelled the review and gifted the Texans a touchdown. The Lions, who were leading 24-14 before the play, ended up losing the game in overtime. After the season the rules committee changed the rule (the "Jim Schwartz rule") so that the penalty would no longer cancel the automatic review.
• Odd Name Out: The Watt brothers. J.J. is the oldest, T.J. is the youngest, and the middle brother is named... Derek.
• Oddball in the Series: Super Bowls have always been numbered using Roman numerals. Since the 50th Super Bowl would be the awkwardly named "Super Bowl L", the NFL instead chose to use Arabic numerals for it and switched back the next year.
• Older Than Television: The NFL was founded in 1920, with three extant teams (Cardinals, Bears, Packers) being even older. However, the NFL was a niche sport behind baseball and even college football on the national radar for its first forty or so years. It wasn't until the NFL landed several major television contracts in the '60s that it became nationally popular, soon after becoming America's most watched sport.
• Old Hero, New Pals: Any time a Super Bowl winning QB changes teams and then has more success. Some particularly notable examples:
  • After winning four Super Bowls in the '80s with the 49ers, Joe Montana requested a trade following the emergence of former backup Steve Young and was traded to the Chiefs. He immediately led them on a deep playoff run, falling in the AFC Championship game.
  • In 2012, following a season missed due to a career threatening neck injury, Peyton Manning was granted his release from the Colts and signed with the Broncos. He set multiple single-season passing records while Denver became the highest scoring team in league history in his second year there. In 2015, he became the first starting QB to win a Super Bowl with two teams before retiring.
  • In 2020, Tom Brady left the Patriots after an NFL record for a QB 20 seasons and six Super Bowl wins. He joined the Buccaneers, and though he did convince "old pal" Rob Gronkowski to come out of retirement to join him, won another Super Bowl in Tampa with a team of otherwise "new pals".
• Ominous Fog: The 1988 Divisional Playoff Game between the Bears and Eagles, now better known as the "Fog Bowl", was completely covered in a thick late-December fog that made the game all but unwatchable even for people in attendance and made it difficult for the visiting Eagles to use their heavy passing attack, giving the hometeam Bears an advantage that they used to eek out the win. This unusual weather system dissipated soon after the game was over, and many only half-jokingly explained it as being created by the mutual hatred between Bears coach Mike Ditka and opponent (and former defensive coordinator) Buddy Ryan; the two had worked together a few years prior to make one of the most dominant defenses in league history and won Super Bowl XX, but they also openly hated each other.
• Orange/Blue Contrast: The color schemes of the Bears and Broncos.
• Outdated Outfit: Throwback uniforms tend to be either beloved (the Chargers powder blues) or reviled (the Steelers "bumblebee" stripes and the Eagles "blue and gold"), with very little in between. The Buccaneers "creamsicle" uniforms are a particular source of YMMV. Some love them for just how unique they are while others consider them perhaps the worst uniform in professional sports.
• Overrated and Underleveled:
  • There have been many examples of elite college players drafted high in the NFL who never develop into quality pro starters yet continue to get opportunities (and big pay days) in the league. Sam Bradford, a Heisman-winning quarterback who went #1 overall in 2010, is a prime example. He was oft-injured and was quite average when he did play, with his best trait being that he was good at avoiding turnovers. He landed starting jobs on four teams over nearly a decade, ending his career with $129 million in earnings and a below .500 record.
  • Free agents from teams who just won the Super Bowl tend to have highly inflated value on the market and rarely carry over that success to their new teams. Two of the most infamous examples won Super Bowl MVP right before moving on to other teams as free agents. Larry Brown intercepted two passes for the Cowboys in Super Bowl XXX but was a miserable failure as a free agent signing with the Raiders. Dexter Jackson was MVP of Super Bowl XXXVII for the Bucs, then signed a big free agent deal with the Cardinals where he played a single disappointing season before returning to the Bucs on a more modest contract.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: A number of players have had legendary NFL careers that stood out as among the greatest ever but had the unfortunate luck of playing shortly before or around the same time as an even better player at their position who overshadowed their accomplishments. To note:
  • A prime example is Drew Brees, who racked up all-time great statistics and won a Super Bowl but whose career overlapped almost exactly with that of Tom Brady, who left him at #2 in most major career statistics, dwarfed his one Super Bowl with seven, and also tacked on three regular season MVP awards to Brees' zero.
  • Steve Largent is a Hall of Fame WR who was the first great player in Seahawks team history and retired with virtually every career receiving record to his name. Only a few years later, all-time great WR Jerry Rice came along and rewrote the receiving record books, setting them so high that many are considered untouchable even in the NFL's modern "pass happy" era. Largent barely even gets a mention in the "greatest wide receivers" discussion.
• Padded Sumo Gameplay: Games between teams with weak offenses but strong defenses can quickly devolve into this. Big gains and scoring plays are rare while the games usually turn on a big defensive or special teams play, like forcing a turnover and returning it for a touchdown. The 2000 Ravens are a classic example, having one of the greatest defenses of all time but conservative, run-heavy offense that at one point went five straight games without scoring an offensive touchdown.
• Paranoia Gambit: The intent of pre-snap movement by the defense is to cause this in the opposing quarterback. Unlike the offense who must remain "set" for a full second prior to snapping the ball (with the exception of one legal "man in motion" who can be moving as long as it isn't toward the line of scrimmage), defenders can move however they please. Most often, the "back seven" (a combination of linebackers, corners, and safeties) will creep closer to the line of scrimmage, potentially tricking the quarterback into thinking they're going to blitz. If successful, the QB may adjust his protections to defenders who aren't actually blitzing, allowing the actual pass rushers to get through. They may also trick the QB into throwing the ball to an earlier, typically less aggressive read, trying to get it out of his hands more quickly to avoid a sack. Peyton Manning was one of the all time greats at avoiding this, reading the defense before the snap (even if they tried to move and throw him off) then targeting the defense's weak spot.
• Picked Last:
  • The actual last selection in a given draft is deemed "Mr. Irrelevant", getting a trophy that looks like the Heisman but with the player fumbling the ball.
  • "Draft steals" and undrafted players (who weren't picked at all) are the NFL equivalent. Some particularly notable examples:
    • Hall of Famers Dick "Night Train" Lane, Warren Moon, John Randle, and Kurt Warner all went undrafted to start their careers.
    • Hall of Fame quarterbacks Joe Montana and Brett Favre were selected in the 3rd round (1979) and 2nd round (1991), respectively.
    • Tom Brady, selected in the 6th round of the 2000 Draft (#199 overall) is perhaps the greatest "draft steal" of all time. Worse, he was the 7th quarterback selected that year. Only two^note Jets 1st rounder Chad Pennington, who led his teams to four playoff appearances while being named Comeback Player of the Year twice, and Rams 6th rounder Marc Bulger, who went to the Pro Bowl twice even had careers worth mentioning.
    • Aaron Rodgers was the favorite to be selected #1 overall in the 2005 Draft by the 49ers, his hometown team. Instead, they selected Alex Smith, setting Rodgers up for one of the most embarrassing draft slides in NFL history until the Packers finally picked him at #24 to be the heir apparent to the aforementioned Brett Favre. Rodgers would go on to be a three-time league MVP and win a Super Bowl.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: There have been a number of very small (especially by NFL standards) players who have nonetheless experienced great success. Some prominent examples:
  • The "Bronze Bullet" Buddy Young was listed at a generous 5'4" and was one of the smallest people to ever play pro football. His talents as a running back helped to break the color barrier in the NFL both as a player in the late '40s and later as an executive.
  • Hall of Fame RB Barry Sanders was listed at 5'8", 200 lbs, and retired as the leagues #2 all-time leading rusher. He didn't retire due to age or injury concerns but rather Losing the Team Spirit after being stuck on an awful Lions team for his entire career.
  • Steve Smith Sr. was a receiver for the Panthers and Ravens knowing for his feisty demeanor and diminutive size, listed at 5'9" 195 lbs. He retired as the only player under 6'0" in the top 10 of the NFL's career receiving yardage list.
  • Maurice Jones-Drew was a running back most famous for his time with the Jaguars in the late '00s through the early '10s. Listed at 5'7" (and that being rather generous), he fell to the 2nd round of the 2006 despite a highly productive college career and exceptional Combine performance. Despite his size, he proved to be a fierce power runner, with the Jaguars even taking their other running back, 6'1 225 pound Fred Taylor, off the field for "MJD" in short-yardage and goal line situations before supplanting him entirely. MJD led the league in rushing in 2011, made three Pro Bowls, and retired having generated over 10,000 yards of total offensive in his career.
  • While certainly not "pint-sized" by usual standards at 6'1", 280 lbs, Aaron Donald is positively tiny for an NFL defensive tackle. Nonetheless, he has become perhaps the most dominant defender of the 21st century, winning Defensive Player of the Year a record-tying three times.
• Popcultural Osmosis: Green Bay, Wisconsin and Canton, Ohio are only notable in the popular consciousness due to being the home of the Packers and the Pro Football Hall of Fame, respectively.
• Pretender Diss: The NFL's historic attitude toward any other North American professional football leagues is to largely ignore them as pretenders, while sometimes raiding them for talent. This ultimately worked to drive off the original incarnations of the AFL, the AAFC, WFL, USFL, and XFL. The '60s AFL was able to stand-up to the NFL, forcing them into a gentleman's agreement not to sign the other league's players before eventually merging. The Canadian and Arena leagues are generally different enough for the NFL not to view them as direct competition.
• Promotion to Parent: Former Bucs and Falcons RB Warrick Dunn famously had this happen just days after his 18th birthday when his single mother, a police officer, was killed in the line of duty. Dunn was able to juggle raising his younger siblings while attending college, becoming a 1st round draft pick, and having a stellar pro career. Now, he runs a charity which provides housing to families in circumstances like his.
• Put Me In, Coach!: There have been countless great performances from unheralded backups in league history. A few of the most prominent examples:
  • In 1992, Packers starting QB Don Majkowski suffered an ankle injury. Green Bay turned to his backup, a second-year former 2nd round pick of the Falcons who the Packers traded for that offseason. That QB, Brett Favre, went on to start for 321 consecutive games in a Hall of Fame career.
  • In 1999, the (then) St. Louis Rams lost starting QB Trent Green to a preseason injury. They turned to their backup, a former Arena League player with only a handful of NFL pass attempts to his name. Kurt Warner went on to win league MVP and lead the Rams to their first Super Bowl victory as a franchise.
  • In 2001, Patriots long-time starting QB Drew Bledsoe suffered a brutal hit from rival Jets linebacker Mo Lewis which left Bledsoe with internal bleeding. The Patriots turned to an untested second-year former 6th round pick named Tom Brady, and the rest is history.
  • In 2017, the Eagles lost presumptive league MVP QB Carson Wentz to a torn ACL late in the season. Journeyman backup Nick Foles, who had previously contemplated retirement, stepped in. Though shaky, he managed to clinch the #1 seed and then win the teams first playoff game. Starting with the NFC Championship game against the Vikings, Foles Took a Level in Badass with a dominant performance and carried that into Super Bowl LII where he defeated Tom Brady and the Patriots in a wild shootout, delivering Philadelphia its first Super Bowl victory.
  • Week 8 of the 2021 season has been dubbed the "week of the backup QB" in media circles after four backups^note Mike White of the Jets, Cooper Rush of the Cowboys (each making their first career starts no less), Geno Smith of the Seahawks, and Trevor Siemian of the Saints were all forced into action due to injury. They went 4-0, combined for 1,084 passing yards, and threw eight TD passes.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Any time a team wins but suffers a crippling injury to a key player or leaves themselves exhausted for the next game. Some notable historic examples:
  • In 1981, the then San Diego Chargers and Dolphins met in a double overtime thriller dubbed the "Epic in Miami", ultimately won by the Chargers. Making matters worse was the humid Florida weather and 88 degree temperature, exhausting both teams. The very next week, the Chargers faced the Bengals in Cincinnati in the coldest NFL game ever played, dubbed the "Freezer Bowl", falling 27-7.
  • In the 2001 season, Patriots starting QB Drew Blesdoe suffered internal bleeding after a vicious hit by rival Jets linebacker Mo Lewis. The Patriots were forced to turn to an untested second-year QB selected in the 6th round named Tom Brady, who averted the trope by leading the Patriots to their first of six Super Bowl wins during his time with the team.
  • Following the 2015 season, the Steelers met the division rival Bengals in the Wildcard Round of the playoffs. The Bengals were on their way to a win when notoriously dirty LB Vontaze Burfict delivered an ugly illegal hit to Steelers star WR Antonio Brown, knocking him unconscious. The penalty kept the Steelers drive alive, ending with a game-winning field goal. However, without their top offensive weapon, the Steelers fell to the Broncos the following week.
  • The USFL, a spring competitor to the NFL that ran from 1983-1985 with some success, decided to move the 1986 season to the fall to compete head-to-head against the NFL. The real reason behind the move was because a group of owners, led by New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump, believed the move to the fall would trigger either a large settlement in a Federal Anti-Trust Lawsuit, the admission of some of the teams into the NFL, or both. At the time, the NFL aired on all 3 major broadcast networks, with those networks declining to add (or in the case of ABC retaining) the USFL if it meant dropping the NFL. The legal case of USFL vs NFL was technically decided in the favor of the USFL, but the jury felt the USFL really did everything in their power to destroy themselves by not contacting the new Fox network, moving from the less demanding spring season, and failing to accept a deal from ESPN (who agreed to maintain the broadcasts with the new season date). The USFL victory was $1, tripled to $3 under US federal law. (The check has famously never been cashed.) The 1986 season was cancelled, the league folded, and none of the remaining owners have ever owned a team in the NFL.

Q-Z

• The Quarterback: Naturally. It is the most important, most popular, and highest paid position on the field. Because of this status, they have a number of special protections in the rules no other position enjoys and their own page.
• The Quiet One: Marshawn Lynch, a RB most famous for his time with the Seahawks, is (in)famous for being difficult to interview, at one point answering every question with "I'm just here so I don't get fined." He announced his retirement from the 'Hawks by tweeting an emoji of cleats hanging up and a peace sign. ("Hanging up cleats. Peace out.")
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits:
  • The Raiders of the '70s and early '80s. Many of their players were castoffs from other NFL teams who were considered washed up or had colorful (or "downright criminal") personalities; they all had huge chips on their shoulders and were known as the "bad guys" of the NFL because of their highly aggressive play (especially players like George Atkinson and Jack Tatum). They were also a successful bunch of misfits, winning Super Bowls XI, XV, and XVIII.
  • Washington under Hall of Famers GM Bobby Beathard and head coach Joe Gibbs put together some very "ragtag" yet successful teams. Beathard in particular is famous for assembling winning teams out of players "other teams didn't want" including CB Darrell Green (who he selected in the first round despite being undersized and playing at a D-II college), DE Dexter Manley (who was functionally illiterate), and QB Doug Williams (a black QB few other teams were willing to sign after his stint in the USFL). Gibbs became the only head coach ever to win three Super Bowls with three different starting quarterbacks. Perhaps the purest example of this trope is the 1987 team of replacement players they put together during a players strike that went 3-0, including a Monday Night Football win over hated rival Dallas who had the majority of their regular players back. (This team was the basis for the The Replacements.)
• Real Men Hate Affection: Averted. Despite being stereotyped as the ultimate sport for "macho meatheads", football players constantly show physical affection on the field after big plays or wins. Hugs, special handshakes and high fives, chest bumps, butt slaps, and even carrying coaches off the field after big games are all common expressions. Following serious injuries or major losses, players also often press their helmets or foreheads together. Further, it has become a tradition that prospects who attend the draft hug the commissioner upon being selected and announced on stage.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Each October, for breast cancer awareness month, players, coaches, and even officials will wear pink accessories (gloves, headbands, wristbands, towels, etc.) which are then auctioned off with the proceeds going toward a cancer charity.
• Reset Button: Teams which enter what is typically referred to as a "rebuilding" phase are essentially hitting this button. This usually involves firing the previous administration (front office and coaching staff), hiring brand new replacements, and then trading veteran players (who are more expensive and will likely be past their prime by the time the team is ready to compete again) for draft picks to bring in young talent.
• Retcon: In 1996, Browns owner Art Modell infamously moved the team to Baltimore, renaming it the Ravens. The move proved so controversial that as part of a league-brokered settlement of a court case brought by the city of Cleveland, the Browns' history and records remained in that city, to be taken up by a "new" Browns team that began play in 1999. So, as far as the NFL is concerned, the Ravens are an expansion team that began play in 1996, even though it had the same ownership and management structure as the "old" Browns. Conversely, the Browns are officially on the books as a team founded in 1946 even though the current iteration of the team really only came into existence in 1999.
• The Rival:
  • The oldest and most-played rivalry in the NFL is between the Bears and Packers. The teams have played over 200 times over 100 years with the Packers holding a slight advantage in wins and points scored.
  • The Cowboys have a fierce rivalry with each of their division opponents. Any Cowboys/Giants prime time game is likely to be the most-watched NFL regular season game of a given season. The NFL also carefully polices the timing of the Cowboys/Eagles matchups, usually having the Cowboys visit Philadelphia in the first half of the season so that there is no chance for Eagles fans to pelt the Cowboys with snowballs. (They've done worse, after all...)
  • The Steelers and Ravens have one of the most intense rivalries of recent history. Each teams has been a perennial playoff contender in the 21st century, with their matchups usually deciding the winner of the AFC North. Both are also well known for practicing tough, physical styles of football on both sides of the ball, leading to a ton of hard hits.
• Road Trip Across the Street:
  • Happens whenever the Jets and Giants, or Rams and Chargers, who each share a stadium, play each other. The designated "road" team has to use the visiting locker room while the field is painted with the emblems and colors of the designated "home" team.
  • In 2021, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers became the first team to ever play a Super Bowl in their home stadium. It's normally a neutral site game with the venue selected years in advance. As the Bucs were the designated "home" team (which alternates between the AFC and NFC representative each year), they got to use their own locker room, but were not permitted to use any of their other stadium traditions, such as firing the cannons of their pirate ship.
    • Prior to this, two teams had played in a venue that was located in their home market. The Los Angeles Raiders played XIV in the Rose Bowl in neighboring Pasadena (where UCLA plays their home games); they lost (though it was a much closer game than many expected). The San Francisco 49ers played in Stanford Stadium in XIX, easily beating the Dolphins; this was notable because Stanford was actually closer to the Niners' HQ and training camps than their then-home in Candlestick Park.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Games between teams with powerful offenses but weak defenses can easily turn into this. Big plays and long gains happen seemingly every other play as the teams trade scores. However, this can also occur when the offenses and defenses are playing their best. A 2018 Monday Night Football game between the Chiefs and the Rams is a prime example that featured six lead changes, including four in the fourth quarter, due in part to the defenses scoring three TDs themselves. The Rams pulled out a 54-51 victory in the third highest scoring game of all time, the first where both teams scored more than 50 points, and the only game in the top three to be a one-score contest.
• Rookie Red Ranger: Due to the nature of the quarterback position, rookie quarterbacks who end up as starters become this. As the entire offense flows through this position, the quarterback becomes the de facto leader out on the field, even if more experienced players exist at other positions as well as the more experienced but less talented (or physically declining due to age) backup quarterback. It's considered ideal to let the rookie quarterback spend a couple of years as a backup to make the transition from college to the pros, but teams rarely have enough salary cap space to keep an established star as the starting QB and pay an expected future superstar to sit on the bench and as a result rookie starting quarterbacks are becoming more common. The results of a rookie starting QB are usually mixed, at best, but a few prime examples from NFL history stand out:
  • 1983 - Dan Marino starts 10 games for the Miami Dolphins, setting numerous rookie passing records in the process. He went 9-1 as a starter, earning the Dolphins a spot in the playoffs.
  • 1999 - Shaun King becomes the first "true" (straight out of college) rookie QB in the Super Bowl era to lead his team to a playoff victory for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. ^note Pat Hayden won a playoff game for the Los Angeles Rams in 1976 during his rookie year in the NFL, but had played a professional season previously in the World Football League.
  • 2004 - Ben Roethlisberger leads the Pittsburgh Steelers to a 15-1 record and breaks many of the records previously set by Dan Marino in the process.
  • 2012 - A record five rookie quarterbacks begin the seasons as starters for their teams (Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III, Ryan Tannehill, Brandon Weeden, and Russell Wilson for Indianapolis, Washington, Miami, Cleveland, and Seattle, respectively). Numerous records were broken by these quarterbacks with Luck, Griffin, and Wilson all leading their teams to surprise playoff appearances.
  • 2018 - #1 overall draft pick Baker Mayfield leads the Cleveland Browns to a 21-17 victory against the New York Jets, their first since Christmas 2016. Mayfield would go on to start for the rest of the season, setting the record for passing touchdowns by a rookie QB.
  • 2020 - Justin Herbert takes over as starting QB for the Los Angeles Chargers and breaks the rookie touchdown pass record set my Mayfield only a few seasons prior.
• Rules Lawyer: Coaches will attempt to push their interpretations of the rules as well as abuse any loopholes they find to give their team an advantage. Patriots coach Bill Belichick has long had this reputation, while his former player-turned-coach Mike Vrabel has taken it even further with his name ("Vrabeling") becoming short hand for using underhanded though not illegal tactics regarding clock stoppages late in games.
• Rule Zero: The referee, the head official on the field, ultimately has the authority to rule a play according to his interpretation of the rules. While it has never been invoked at the NFL level, this includes the "Palpably Unfair Act" rule in which he can award a touchdown to the opposing team for a grievous enough offense. The closest it has come to being called was a Thanksgiving Day game in 2013 when Ravens return man Jacoby Jones broke away along the Steelers sideline during a kickoff return but Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin stepped on the field, forcing Jones to cut back inside where he was tackled from behind. The Ravens (coached by John Harbaugh, a member of the league's competition committee) argued that they should be awarded with a touchdown, but only a 15-yard Unsportsmanlike Conduct penalty was imposed.^note The Ravens would go on to win anyway while Tomlin was fined $100,000, the second highest fine ever levied against an NFL head coach.
• Save Our Team: Happens whenever there are rumors of team relocating. Some, like the Saints following Hurricane Katrina and the Bills amid rumors of moving to Toronto, have stayed put in part due to massive outpourings of fan support. Others, like the Rams and Chargers moving to L.A. from St. Louis and San Diego respectively, have not. Some have even taken drastic measures to get around this trope, like the Colts leaving Baltimore on a bunch of moving vans in the middle of the night to avoid being seized by eminent domain.
• Scandalgate: Spygate, Bountygate, Deflategate... Expect just about any NFL controversy to gain this suffix.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: A number of players over the years have been willing to pay the fines for uniform violation in order to wear accessories, particularly cleats, that bring awareness to charities and causes they support. When the NFL added a rule that the on-field officials could remove players who are in violation of uniform rules from the field, players protested and the NFL relented by giving them one week each season in which they can wear cleats to support any charitable cause they want known as "My Cause, My Cleats".
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: RB Marshawn Lynch, most famous for his time with the Seahawks, was a magnet for fines but made enough money that he didn't care. A huge fan of Skittles, he frequently wore Skittles-colored cleats and simply paid the fine each time, helped by the fact that Skittles was a sponsor. Lynch was also famous for being The Quiet One and paying fines instead of having to talk to the press. Famously, when told he couldn't do so before a Super Bowl, he went to a press conference and answered every question with "I'm just here so I don't get fined."
• Second Place Is for Losers: Any team who loses a Super Bowl is certain to feel this way, but some franchises have become especially notable for it:
  • The Bills and Vikings are both 0-4 in the Super Bowl in team history, with the Bills losses coming in four straight Super Bowls.
  • For all their Super Bowl wins, the Patriots single most famous Super Bowl moment came when they lost Super Bowl XLII after the league's first ever 16-0 regular season.
  • The 2016 Falcons jumped out to a 28-3 lead over the Patriots in Super Bowl LI... only to blow the largest lead in Super Bowl history and lose in overtime. Several members of the team, including offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan^note who later blew a smaller but later-in-the-game Super Bowl lead as head coach of the 49ers and QB Matt Ryan, will forever this loss hanging over their heads.
• Secret Test of Character:
  • JaMarcus Russell was a QB selected #1 overall by the then Oakland Raiders in 2007. Growing frustrated with Russell's lack of effort, they gave him a blank DVD telling him that it had plays on it they wanted him to study at home. When he came in the next day and said that he had liked "all of" the plays on the disc, they knew he hadn't even looked at it. Russell went down in history soon after as one of the biggest draft busts of all time.
  • The Patriots under Bill Belichick and VP Scott Pioli would give their team's playbook to quarterback prospects they were interested in drafting. On the final page, they would staple a $100 bill. When they interviewed the prospects later, they'd wait to see if the prospects mentioned it to see if they actually read it all the way through or not. This "test" was shown in Draft Day.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: The publicly owned Packers have one built in to their team charter to protect against the team being purchased and moved. Any post-sale profits must be donated to the Green Bay Packers Foundation charity (which replaced building a soldier's memorial in 1997), ensuring that there would never be any financial incentive to move the team.
• Sell-Out: When the NFL allowed for true free agency in 1993 (only after being forced to by a court order), many teams and media outlets attempted to paint any players moving teams as one of these, derisively nicknaming them "mercenaries". Hall of Fame DE Reggie White, in the conversation for the greatest defensive player of all time, became the first big name to change teams as a free agent when he left the Eagles to sign with the Packers. This reputation for free agents remained for much of the '90s, even showing up in Any Given Sunday, but ultimately died out as free agency has become an essential part of NFL operations.
• Serious Business: Obviously, fans and players both take football with a degree of seriousness that non-sports/football fans are more than a little confused or exasperated by, but there is at least the history, economics, and personal development of players to consider when talking "real" football. Fantasy football, the gaming experience that uses weekly performance stats and plugs them into a fake roster, takes this to another level. It has reached a point where players who do exactly what they're supposed to do (for example, slide down short of the goal line to seal a victory^note Scoring gives the ball back to the opponent, where they will have a slim chance of winning. Stopping short and then taking a knee ends the game.) have received death threats from irate fantasy players who, in some extreme cases, have lost out on six-figure grand prizes because a player has chosen not to score in this fashion.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: In the final weeks of a season, many media hours are spent agonizing over playoff scenarios. Who "controls their own destiny"^note if the team wins out, they are guaranteed to be in the playoffs, who "needs help"^note winning out alone isn't enough, they need other teams ahead of them to lose, and how (often very complex) tiebreakers will fall. Then, in the final week of the season, at least a few of these teams will be unceremoniously eliminated, sometimes despite winning their final games.
• The Show Must Go On: The day before a Monday Night Football game against the then Oakland Raiders, Packers quarterback Brett Favre learned his father died from a heart attack. Even though he was offered the chance to sit the game out, Favre decided to play anyway, believing it was what his father would have wanted him to do (and keeping his NFL record start streak alive). He went on to have one of the best performances of his career, throwing for 399 yards, 4 touchdowns, and achieving a passer rating of 153.9 (just shy of perfect) en route to a 41-7 victory.
• Sibling Rivalry: Any set of brothers who play against each other naturally have elements of this. Some notable examples:
  • Peyton and Eli Manning played each other three times, with Peyton winning each matchup. However, the "rivalry" was mostly played up by media and fans. The brothers themselves admitted that they didn't actually like playing the other, and this is one of the reasons Peyton chose to sign with the Broncos in the AFC rather than the Cardinals in the NFC (where he'd be more likely to play against Eli).
  • The Harbaugh brothers, John and Jim, were the head coaches of the Ravens and 49ers respectively when they met in Super Bowl XLVII, dubbed "the Harbowl". John's Ravens defeated Jim's 49ers.
• Sigil Spam: Both the league itself and every team in it will plaster their logos on everything.
• Signature Move: A number of players throughout league history have had one. When it proves too effective, the league often bans it. If not, expect it to be copied. Some prominent examples:
  • Hall of Fame corner Dick "Night Train" Lane had the "Night Train Necktie", a tackle where he wrapped up the ball carrier around the neck. Due to the danger it posed, it was soon banned.
  • Hall of Fame defensive lineman Deacon Jones had the "head slap", which is exactly what it sounds like. On the snap of the ball, he would slap the head of the opposing offensive lineman, disorienting him so Jones could slip by. It was also banned for being too effective.
  • While he wasn't the first to do it, former Cowboys safety Roy Williams became infamous for using the "Horse Collar Tackle", bringing opponents down by grabbed their shoulder pads from behind. After causing several high profile injuries, including to Hall of Fame WR Terrell Owens, it was banned and Williams became the first player suspended for violating the next season.
• Skeleton Motif: The Buccaneers logo after they dropped the "creamsicle/Bucco Bruce" uniform/logo in 1994 now features a classic pirate flag with a skull-and-crossbones swung from a sword.
• Sleeves Are for Wimps:
  • Even in the coldest games, the majority of players will not wear long sleeves under their uniforms, especially linemen, for this exact reason.^note More practically, any sleeves thick enough to make a difference would restrict mobility.
  • Six-time Super Bowl champion head coach Bill Belichick is also famous for frequently wearing a custom Patriots hoodie with the sleeves cut off.
• Snowball Fight: Given the timing of the NFL season, snow storms before or during games are a late-season possibility in northern cities. Less polite fans have been known to express their displeasure by tossing snowballs onto the field. The NFL carefully polices the scheduling of Eagles games against their division rivals, especially the Cowboys, to reduce the chances of this happening. Eagles fans once pelted Santa Claus with snowballs, after all. Bengals coach Sam Wyche once famously got on the PA system of his own stadium to admonish fans who were slinging snowballs.
• Spiritual Antithesis: In 2005, with legendary QB Brett Favre nearing the end of this career, the Packers selected Aaron Rodgers as his heir apparent with their first round pick. Favre was the epitome of a gunslinging, off-script passer favoring deep pass attempts, often into heavy coverage, that (more often than not) resulted in big plays for the offense. He retired with nearly every major career passing record... including some negative ones, like career interceptions thrown. Rodgers was the complete opposite as a player while still finding major success, having pinpoint accuracy and being one of the best passers in league history at avoiding interceptions. On the less fortunate side, while Favre was a Made of Iron Determinator who started a record 321 straight games and continued to play well through injury, Rodgers has missed the better part of two seasons and has played through injury in others where his play took a noticeable dip.
• Stage Mom: Todd Marinovich was a QB selected by the the Los Angeles Raiders in the 1st round in 1991. Marinovich had a claim to fame even before starting his college career as the "ROBO QB" of California. Todd's father, Marv, served as the first strength and conditioning coach in the NFL for the Raiders (then in Oakland) where he adapted Eastern Bloc training methods for football. Even before he was born, Todd was being conditioned to be the ultimate athlete. Todd was raised on a very strict diet (his mother was not even allowed to eat sugar or salt while pregnant with him), was forbidden to indulge in normal childhood activities (such as watching cartoons), and was tutored in every aspect of playing football. Once he got to the NFL, he became an infamous draft bust. Todd never especially liked football; he just couldn't tell his obsessed father he wanted to do something else. Once he got to the NFL, with no one to tell him what to do, he spent more of his time getting stoned than maintaining his talent.
• Station Ident: The league has a contractual requirement for all of its broadcasters to air a short ident before kickoff and after the game, treated by the league as the official beginning and end of a game telecast — given that everything in between is subjected to various oversight rules and copyright ownership by the league. One of these vanity plates will also traditionally boast that the network is that year's Super Bowl broadcaster when appropriate.
• Stone Wall:
  • In terms of positions, this is the exact role of the "nose tackle". Typically the largest player on defense, if not the entire field, his job is plug up the middle of the field while tying up multiple blockers thanks to his size, forcing one-on-one blocking matchups for his fellow defenders to take advantage of and make plays. William "the Refrigerator" Perry was a prominent example for the '85 Bears (see below) while Vince Wilfork (most famous for his time with the dynastic Patriots) is considered the best NT of the 21st century so far.
  • The league has seen some all-time great defensive performances who have stifled opponents with record-setting years. To note:
    • The '85 Bears, in contention as one of the best overall teams of all time^note NFL Network named the #2 team of the Super Bowl era, behind only the "perfect season" '72 Dolphins, had perhaps the greatest defense of all time. Running their highly aggressive "46 Defense" (named after safety Doug Plank who wore that number and was the "8th man in the box" that made the defense special), they raced to a 15-1 record, allowed only 12.4 PPG, forced a league high 56 turnovers, and featured three future Hall of Famers^note LB Mike Singletary, DT Dan Hampton, and DE Richard Dent. They shut out both playoff opponents, then held Super Bowl XX opponent the Patriots to just 10 points (with the TD scored late, long after the outcome had been decided).
    • The 2000 Ravens are the other top contender for "greatest defense of all time". Unlike the '85 Bears, they were not a complete team, running a very conservative offense which infamously failed to score a touchdown for five straight games at one point. The defense, led by Hall of Famers Ray Lewis and Rod Woodson, carried the team to a 12-4 record while setting the NFL record for fewest rushing yards allowed in a 16 game season. Like the Bears, they stifled their post-season opponents, allowing just 3, 10, and 3 points during the playoffs then beating the NFC Champion Giants 34-7 in Super Bowl XXXV.
• Super Bowl Special: Naturally, as the Trope Namer and Trope Codifier. Companies spend millions of dollars for a 30 second ad during the Super Bowl.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • Toward the end of a disappointing 2006 season as head coach of the Dolphins, Nick Saban stated over and over that he would not be leaving to become head coach at Alabama. Less than a month later, he became the head coach at Alabama.
  • Notorious coach Bobby Petrino did the same in 2007, his only season as head coach of the Falcons. He assured the team that he would continue to be their head coach... only to quit mid-season to take a college job at Arkansas.
• Tastes Like Friendship:
  • One of the most famous commercials for Coca-Cola depicts a young boy offering his Coke to the Pittsburgh Steelers' "Mean Joe" Greene, who repays the boy by offering his game-worn jersey. 30 years after the original ad aired, Coca-Cola parodied it with the Steelers' Troy Polamalu.
  • One of the most common forms of rookie hazing involves the veteran players at the rookie's position group goading him into taking them out to dinner. At that point, they'll order all of the most expensive items on the menu and put it on the rookie's bill.
• The Team Benefactor: After former Microsoft exec Paul Allen purchased the Seahawks in 1997, he became the wealthiest NFL owner many times over at the time. However, unlike the highly involved Jerry Joneses and Dan Snyders of the league, Allen was extremely hands-off, preferring to hire the best people and then getting out of their way. He hired Mike Holmgren away from Green Bay who led Seattle to their first Super Bowl appearance, then hired GM John Schneider and coach Pete Carroll who led Seattle to two more, winning one. After Allen's passing in 2018, ownership has fallen to his sister Jodie who has taken the same approach.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Bound to happen in any team situation, especially those where media attention, massive amounts of money, and even bigger egos are in play. Perhaps most famously, Bears coach Mike Ditka and his defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan openly hated each other, even coming to blows on multiple occasions; their Bears team is widely regarded as one of the best to ever see the field, and they won their only Super Bowl as coaches together.
• Tempting Fate: The "announcer jinx" refers to any situation where the announcer of a game is talking up a player, especially about how that player rarely makes mistakes, just before the player makes a mistake. Many football fans will absolutely cringe when the announcer starts talking up their team's kicker just before a crucial field goal attempt for this reason.
• 10-Minute Retirement: Not an uncommon occurrence among players and even some coaches. They'll "retire" to get out of their current situation, only to "unretire" to play/coach for another team months later. Some notable historic examples:
  • Brett Favre is perhaps most infamous for this, "retiring" to end his Packers tenure, only to "unretire" a few months later forcing Green Bay to trade him to the Jets. He "retired" again to get out of New York, who released him, then "unretired" to sign with the Packers division rival Vikings for two more seasons.
  • Bruce Arians is a less infamous coaching example, "retiring" from the Cardinals, going into broadcasting for a year, and then "unretiring" to join the Buccaneers where he recruited Tom Brady and won a Super Bowl in his second year with the team. Similarly, that same year, TE Rob Gronkowski "unretired" to join his former Pats QB in Tampa.
• Terminally Exclusive Club: Members of the 1972 Dolphins, the only team in NFL history to complete a perfect regular and post season. Now the story circulates regularly that every year since, when the last undefeated team in the league finally loses, the surviving members of the team and their legendary coach, Don Shula, gather for a champagne celebration. In truth, some members of the team did it once, without Shula present and more or less as a joke, and the legend took off from there. With Shula's passing in 2020 (preceded in death by several members of the team), perhaps the legend will start to pass as well.
• Too Clever by Half: Some of the biggest plays in NFL history have come down to a coach making a bad call after falling into this trope. One of the most notable (and oft-debated) was the Seahawks decision to attempt a pass at the goal down, down by four, in the final minute of Super Bowl XLIX against the Patriots. Seattle had one of the best short-yardage backs in league history in Marshawn Lynch, with enough time remaining and downs to give him at least two attempts to punch it in. However, after seeing the Patriots come out in a run-stuffing defensive alignment, Seattle made the call to pass instead, the Patriots picked it off, and went on to win.
• Took a Level in Badass: While all teams have, at one point or another, gone from struggling to successful, there are a few particularly notable cases in league history:
  • The Steelers were perhaps the most pathetic team in the pre-merger NFL. In the nearly forty years from their founding until the merger, the team never won a title and only even made the postseason once (in a 1947 divisional tie-breaker, not a championship game). In 1970, they were one of three NFL teams^note alongside the Browns and Colts who switched to the AFC in order to balance the conferences and received $3 million (approximately $18 million today) as compensation. The windfall allowed the historically cash-strapped franchise to begin pursuing and retaining more talented players on their way to winning four Super Bowls in the '70s and remaining a generally very successful franchise ever since.
  • The Packers experienced this twice. After massive success in their early years that gave them enough cache to survive a lean '50s in their small market, coach Vince Lombardi elevated the team to unparalleled success in the '60s, including winning the first two Super Bowls. After his retirement, however, the Packers entered a period of futility known as their "NFL Siberia" years. From the time Lombardi left until 1991, they only had four winning seasons. Then they hired GM Ron Wolf and head coach Mike Holmgren, traded for QB Brett Favre, and signed DE Reggie White during the NFL's first free agency class. They proceeded to win the second most games of any team during the '90s, making two Super Bowls and winning one, and have remained consistently successful ever since.
  • The Patriots were known for decades as one of the weakest teams in the league, with the highlight of their franchise being blown out by the '85 Bears in Super Bowl XX. After their owner had to sell the team to avoid bankruptcy, the Pats narrowly avoided being shipped out of New England entirely when Robert Kraft purchased the team. Things quickly turned around under his ownership, as the team became Super Bowl contenders even before Brady and Belichick elevated them to arguably the most successful dynasty in NFL history in the 2000s and 2010s.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • RB Marshawn Lynch, most famous for his time with the Seahawks where he won a Super Bowl, loves Skittles. This, naturally, led to an endorsement deal with the candy company and the Seahawks' concessions selling a "Beast Mode Burger" with a side of Skittles.
  • QB Patrick Mahomes famously has a love for ketchup, even putting it on steak (a real food faux pas for most people) which has made its way into commercials.
• Transatlantic Equivalent: While the NFL is by far the biggest and most popular professional football league in the world, the Canadian Football League (CFL) and Aussie Rules Football League (AFL) are quite popular with a number of similarities in their home countries. To note:
  • Super Bowl (NFL) / Grey Cup (CFL) / Grand Final (AFL): Championship game that's become a major spectacle beyond just a sporting event, to the extent of being an unofficial holiday (the day before the Grand Final has in fact become a state holiday in Victoria).
  • Las Vegas Raiders (NFL) / Collingwood Magpies (AFL): Black-clad team with boisterous, uncouth fanbase, widely loathed by rivals. No CFL equivalent, however.
  • Green Bay Packers (NFL) / Geelong Cats (AFL): Traditional power located in the league's smallest home market, which is absolutely fanatical about its team. The Saskatchewan Roughriders (CFL) don't fit the "traditional power" part, but very much fit the rest of the statement.
• Underrated and Overleveled: There are countless examples of players who, at the college level, never displayed significant pro potential yet, upon reaching the NFL, break out and wildly exceed expectations. Often drafted very low or not at all, these players seem to come out of nowhere to casual fans. Perhaps the greatest example of all time is a certain Michigan QB who struggled to hang on to the starting job in college, put up middling statistics when he did start, was ultimately drafted in the 6th round, led his team to a Super Bowl the next season after coming off the bench, and now has more Super Bowl titles than any single NFL franchise.
• Unfortunate Names: Richard Shiner had an interesting career as a journeyman QB in the '60s and '70s, most notably posting the first perfect passer rating after the invention of that particular stat. However, football fans will probably only know him for being cursed with the name "Dick Shiner".
• Unperson:
  • Any player who commits an especially violent or graphic crime can typically expect this treatment in the media. Despite their accomplishments and his major presence in the NFL and pop culture in the '70s and '80s, you'll hardly ever see O. J. Simpson mentioned in a positive context in NFL Media without reference to his murder allegations and subsequent legal issues.
  • O.J. is, at least, still in the Hall of Fame, having made it into Canton before becoming otherwise Unpersoned; while the issue has been raised numerous times over the decades, no one enshrined in the Hall has been removed afterwards even if they later committed serious crimes or had values that are now viewed as detestable. This has generally held true of individual teams' Hall of Fame equivalents, but not all of them: Washington removed the name of their founder and owner of over three decades, George Preston Marshall, from their Ring of Honor due to his virulent racism (he remains in Canton). Other players like Jim Tryer and Darren Sharper who had careers that would almost certainly land them in the Hall of Fame by themselves are considered tremendously unlikely to be inducted due to their off-field crimes.
  • Once popular players whose playstyle has been Condemned by History can suffer this treatment. Despite being multi-time Pro Bowlers, you'll rarely see hard-hitting safeties Jack Tatum and Roy Williams in highlight reels anymore unless they are used in features .
  • Michael Vick managed to just barely subvert the trope. After being built up as an exciting young "face of the league", his career came to a screeching halt when his dogfighting arrest came out. He received this treatment through his prison sentence but managed a productive return when he signed with the Eagles. Though his conviction is still the most notable thing about him in the popular consciousness, his comeback season and the Redemption Quest he went through to try to make up for his crime (including sponsoring an anti-dogfighting bill) salvaged his NFL legacy enough to be involved with NFL Network and league charitable efforts.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Combine "workout warriors" are very raw in terms of football experience and skills but are extremely athletic and able to put on a show at the Combine, raising their draft stock. They are also seen as significant risks of busting, but some NFL scouts and coaches still push for these players hoping to develop their raw athletic talent. In the later years of his life, Raiders owner Al Davis became rather infamous for consistently selecting these types of players to consistently diminishing returns.
• Unsportsmanlike Gloating: Doing so within sight of a ref will get a player slapped with a "Taunting" penalty. At 15 yards, it's equivalent to dangerous acts like Unnecessary Roughness or Roughing the Passer.
• Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object: The teams with the #1 offense and #1 defense have met in the Super Bowl six times in NFL history. In five of them, the "Immovable Object" defense has won, with the sole exception being Super Bowl XXIV where the #1 offense 49ers set a Super Bowl record defeating the #1 defense Broncos 55-10.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Super Bowl. Unlike the other major North American sports leagues who feature best-of-seven series for determining their champion, the NFL's champion is decided by a single game. It is also typically held in the league's newest and most advanced stadiums and/or the biggest/most tourist friendly cities.
• Victory Is Boring: In the first two decades of the 21st century, the Patriots won their division in 17 out of the last 19 seasons, reached 13 AFC championship games, advanced to nine Super Bowls, and won six of them. No team in NFL history had been that dominant for that long. Bill Belichick and Tom Brady have cemented their places as Hall of Famers and contenders for the titles of the greatest coach and greatest quarterback, respectively, in NFL history. While the team has formed a dynasty of historic proportions that will likely never be equaled, it's safe to say that NFL fans became numb to their perennial excellence. Their most recent appearance, Super Bowl LIII, had the lowest ratings of any Super Bowl in a decade; not only was it their third straight appearance, but it was also their fourth in five years.^note The ratings decline also likely had to do with changing media consumption trends, but hey, narratives are fun. It was bad enough that when they finally fell out of playoff contention in 2020 (following the departure of Tom Brady), it was met with widespread celebration.
• Violation of Common Sense: Some games enter situations where a team attempts to do something that would normally be detrimental because the game has reached a point where doing so is actually beneficial. Some specific examples:
  • 99.9% of the game of football sees a team attempting to score touchdowns while preventing the opponent from doing so. However, there are actually circumstances where allowing the opponent to score a touchdown is the best way to proceed. This most commonly takes place near the end of the game with your opponent near the goal line where they are likely to eventually score a touchdown. As long as their lead after the touchdown is eight or fewer points, allowing them the score gets you the ball back with more time left to answer with a score of your own. This famously occurred during Super Bowl XLVI where the Patriots, leading 17-15, allowed the Giants to score a touchdown in the final minute. If the Giants were allowed to run down the clock, they could have kicked a game-winning field goal and denied the Patriots an opportunity to get the ball back. Down 21-17, the Pats did get the ball back but failed to score a TD of their own.
  • Conversely, when the team with the lead is running the ball to take time off of the clock late in the game, they will often allow themselves to be tackled rather than run out of bounds (which stops the clock), fight for additional yardage (where they could be stripped of the football for a fumble), or even score a touchdown (which, in some scenarios, makes it possible for the opposing team to come back and win). If a scenario like the one listed above occurs, this can lead to the surreal experience of the defense trying to corral a runner into their own end zone.
  • Teams will sometimes intentionally take a safety. Typically, this is done while holding a lead of 3+ points (so that the two points from the safety don't matter) while backed up to their own goal line late in the game, though there have been instances of teams doing it when tied or behind to let the defense give them better field position. This gives the team to surrender the safety a free kick and prevents the other team from forcing a turnover or scoring a touchdown on something like a blocked punt or punt return to take the lead.
  • Teams will also sometimes intentionally commit penalties for their secondary effects, such as either stopping the clock or keeping it running depending on what is advantageous in the given situation. Titans coach Mike Vrabel has developed a reputation as a Rules Lawyer for using these sorts of penalties to his advantage.
• Weak, but Skilled: There have been countless examples of players who aren't the biggest or fastest but find NFL success thanks to possessing strong mental skills and "football IQ". Some prominent historical examples:
  • Steve Largent was an undersized receiver who lacked elite speed, but had sure hands, was an incredibly precise route runner, and could read pass defenses like a book to find soft spots in coverage. He retired as the league's all-time leader in most receiving statistics (since surpassed).
  • Emmitt Smith, the NFL's all-time leading rusher, wasn't particularly big (listed at 5'9", 215 lbs) or fast (running a below-average 4.7 40-time at the Combine), but had incredible vision and balance, allowing to him to rack up yardage by predicting where his blocking would open up running lanes and then bounce off all but the surest-tackles.
  • Drew Brees was undersized for a pro QB, listed at 6'0" 210 lbs, and didn't possess notable athleticism. Nonetheless, he was most of the most dominant passers of his era, winning a Super Bowl and becoming the only QB in league history to pass for 5,000+ yards more than once (ultimately doing so five times) thanks to his incredible accuracy and ability to read defenses.
• We Win, Because You Didn't: In 2017, the Browns finished 0-16 (the second time since the 2008 Detroit Lions that a team lost all 16 games). When they started their 2018 season, they played the divisional rival Steelers, and ended in a 21-21 tie. This was monumental for the Browns because: 1.) This was the first time since 2004 that their season opener wasn't a loss, and 2.) This was also the first time since December 2016 that they didn't lose a game, thus ending their two-year losing streak (the Browns would end their winless streak in week 3 when they defeated the Jets).
• Willfully Weak:
  • Once a team has locked up their playoff seeding, expect to see them rest starters and get bench players more experience. This is done to avoid unnecessary injury to their starting lineup in games that are technically irrelevant. There is significant disagreement as to whether this actually helps the team in question as, while it does prevent injuries to starters, it also leaves them rusty come their first playoff game. The Colts of the mid-late '00s were particularly notorious for this, often wrapping up the #1 seed with two or three games left to play, then having poor playoff showings when their starters returned to the lineup.
  • On the opposite end of the league standings, bad teams often face accusations of "tanking" to improve their draft position once it is clear they won't be contending that season. To do this, they often bench more experienced starters, sometimes even trading them away to contending teams, in order to play younger depth players, claiming that they want to get those players more experience while team performance suffers. In the final game of the 2020 season, the Eagles became one of the most egregious examples when they inexplicably benched their starting QB while playing division rival Washington (who was fighting with the Giants for the division crown) to play a former third stringer in the fourth quarter, who proceeded to turn the ball over twice on the way to an Eagles loss (greatly angering Giants fans who felt denied a fair chance to enter the playoffs). Head coach Doug Pederson, who led the Eagles to their only Super Bowl win just three years prior, was fired after the game.
• Wolverine Publicity: A classic saying (with numerous permutations) in the NFL is that "quarterbacks get too much credit when the team is winning and too much blame when the team is losing". Whenever a team is successful, expect to see a disproportionate media focus on their QB, regardless of his actual quality of play. Tim Tebow might be the most shining example in league history, as he often played pitifully but was able to make the one key play needed to pull out victories; these comebacks thus became known as "Tebow Time", ignoring that his team was heavily supported by an elite defense that year.
• Writing Around Trademarks: You may notice around the time of the Super Bowl that many stores and restaurants will be advertising promotions for "The Big Game" or "Super Sunday"; the NFL aggressively enforces its trademark on the name of said game, limiting its use to official sponsors. In fact, they even tried to trademark the phrase "The Big Game" until it was pointed out that it existed long before for several big college football rivalry games.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Extremely common at the line of scrimmage. Typically, the offense calls a play, the defense adjusts their scheme based on the offense's personnel and lineup, and then the offense gets set. At this point, the quarterback surveys the defense and may (if his playcaller allows for it) change the play or make an adjustment to it based on the defensive lineup. Peyton Manning was one of the most famous quarterbacks in recent NFL history for making these types of adjustments.
• You Are Number 6: Former Bengals wide receiver Chad Johnson had his surname legally changed to "Ochocinco" (a mangled Spanish rendition of his jersey number, 85) in 2008. The number 85 in Spanish is actually "ochenta y cinco". "Ochocinco" means "eightfive". In 2011, he was rumored to be changing his name again, this time to "Hachigo" ("eightfive" again, this time in Japanese); however, he ultimately reverted to his birth name in 2012.
• Young Conqueror: There have been a number of surprisingly young players to put up legendary performances, as well as lead their teams to Super Bowl victories. To note:
  • Tom Brady won three Super Bowls in his first five seasons, then had an undefeated season, a league MVP award, and a fourth Super Bowl appearance in his seventh year, all before age 30.
  • Ben Roethlisberger hold the record as the youngest starting QB to win a Super Bowl, doing so in his second season at age 23.

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