53 Football Trivia Questions [With Answers]

The NFL was born in a car dealership. Some guys sat on the running boards of Hupmobiles because there weren’t enough chairs.

That 1920 meeting in Canton, Ohio, is question 1. The other 52 questions below run from league origins through Super Bowl records, quarterback stats, team facts, obscure rules, draft surprises, and stadium culture, each with its answer and a note on why people miss it. Test your NFL knowledge in a quiz duel →

Section	Questions	Easy	Medium	Hard
NFL History & Origins	1-8	3	3	2
Super Bowl Legends	9-16	2	4	2
Quarterback Records	17-23	2	3	2
Team Facts & Rivalries	24-31	3	3	2
Rules You Didn’t Know	32-38	2	2	3
Draft Day Surprises	39-45	2	3	2
Stadium & Game Day	46-53	3	2	3

The full spread: seven categories, three difficulty bands.

A caveat on those difficulty tags before you start. The Easy, Medium, and Hard labels here are my editorial calls, and I hold them loosely, because inside the LearnClash app we stopped trusting exactly this kind of guess earlier this summer. My hand-assigned difficulty labels kept losing arguments with the answer data.

So we built a job that re-grades every question each Monday morning from live play: a question needs at least 10 first-try answers before its rating counts, it moves into the easier pool once 75 percent or more of those first tries are right, and it drops into the harder pool when fewer than 55 percent are. This list never went through that machine. If question 8 feels unfair to you, that’s on me.

For a gentler warmup, start with our 43 sports trivia questions or general knowledge trivia. Running a round for coworkers instead? The team-building trivia guide covers formats built for mixed groups.

NFL History & Origins Questions (1-8)

History is the gap between watching football and knowing football. You can follow every snap of the current season, recite whole depth charts, and still blank the moment a question reaches back past 1970. These eight go all the way back to the founding decade.

1. In what city was the NFL founded, and where did the meeting take place? (Easy)

Answer: Canton, Ohio, at Ralph Hay’s Hupmobile car dealership. On September 17, 1920, fifteen men representing ten teams met in the showroom. There weren’t enough chairs, so some sat on the running boards of the cars.

The trap: Your gut says New York or Chicago. Canton feels too small. But the Canton Bulldogs were the dominant team of the era, and the league put its Hall of Fame there for exactly this reason.

2. How many of the original 14 NFL teams from 1920 still exist today? (Easy)

Answer: Two. The Chicago Bears (originally the Decatur Staleys) and the Arizona Cardinals (originally the Racine Cardinals of Chicago). Every other charter franchise folded.

Fourteen sounds like enough for a few survivors. Early pro football was chaotic, though. Teams folded after a single bad season, and the Staleys only made it because George Halas moved them to Chicago.

3. Which NFL team went 25 games without a loss, the longest unbeaten streak in league history? (Medium)

Answer: The Canton Bulldogs, who went 22-0-3 from 1921 to 1923. Olympic legend Jim Thorpe played for them during that run. Nearly everyone reaches for the 1972 Dolphins or the 2007 Patriots here, but the Bulldogs’ streak is older than the Super Bowl itself, so it sits in a blind spot.

4. When was the first NFL game broadcast on television? (Medium)

Answer: October 22, 1939. NBC broadcast the Brooklyn Dodgers vs. Philadelphia Eagles from Ebbets Field. Two cameras, one announcer, and roughly 1,000 viewers on the TV sets that existed in New York.

The trap is guessing the 1950s or 1960s, when TV football became mainstream. NBC ran this experiment long before most Americans owned a television.

5. What year did the NFL effectively ban Black players, and when were they re-integrated? (Medium)

Answer: The league imposed an unofficial ban in 1933. It lasted until 1946, when the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode. Almost nobody knows the ban existed at all, and the fact that Fritz Pollard and Bobby Marshall had already played in the league’s first season makes the later exclusion even more jarring.

6. Which two NFL teams merged during World War II to form a team called the “Steagles”? (Hard)

Answer: The Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles merged for the 1943 season because both had lost too many players to military service.

“Steagles” reads like a punchline, but the war drained rosters so badly that the NFL merged the Steelers with the Chicago Cardinals the very next year. That team, “Card-Pitt,” lost every game, and fans called them the “Carpets” because everyone walked all over them.

7. How many teams competed in the NFL’s first season in 1920? (Easy)

Answer: 14 teams were members, though only about 11 actually played games. The schedule was informal, and some teams played as few as two games. People guess eight or fewer because they imagine a tidy league structure; “14, sort of” is closer to the truth.

8. Which team scored the first documented touchdown in NFL history? (Hard)

Answer: Records from the 1920 season are incomplete, but the first documented touchdown is credited to players from the Dayton Triangles in their opening-week win. The Triangles won the league’s very first game, 14-0, against the Columbus Panhandles on October 3, 1920.

Why people miss it: The NFL didn’t keep detailed records in its first years, and the Dayton Triangles folded decades ago. There’s no famous name to anchor the memory, just a defunct team and a partial box score.

Super Bowl Legends Questions (9-16)

Everyone has watched a Super Bowl. Far fewer people know the early ones: a name borrowed from a toy, a stadium a third empty, tickets cheaper than a pizza. The traps in this set are mostly about those early years, plus one game decided by a kick that sailed wide right.

Ticket stubs to halftime money: the big game from 1967 to now.

9. What was the Super Bowl originally called? (Easy)

Answer: The AFL-NFL World Championship Game. The name “Super Bowl” came from AFL founder Lamar Hunt, who was inspired by his children’s Super Ball toy, and it didn’t become official until Super Bowl III in 1969. Everyone knows the name; almost nobody knows it was borrowed from a bouncy ball.

10. How much did a ticket to the first Super Bowl cost? (Medium)

Answer: $12. And the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum still had roughly 32,000 empty seats. The game wasn’t a sellout.

Where guesses go wrong: Getting into the game today typically runs $4,000-$6,500 on the resale market. The idea that you could have walked up to the window and bought a $12 seat feels impossible, so people guess high.

11. Which player won Super Bowl MVP despite being on the losing team? (Medium)

Answer: Chuck Howley of the Dallas Cowboys, Super Bowl V (1971). He intercepted two passes and recovered a fumble, but the Cowboys lost to the Baltimore Colts 16-13. MVP is supposed to go to the winning side; Howley broke that rule once, and nobody has done it since.

12. How many Super Bowls has Tom Brady appeared in? (Easy)

Answer: 10 Super Bowls, with 7 wins. That means Brady played in nearly 1 out of every 6 Super Bowls ever held.

Seven wins is the number everyone remembers. Ten appearances is the stat that shocks. No other quarterback has more than five.

13. Do Super Bowl halftime performers get paid? (Medium)

Answer: Not a traditional performance fee. Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, Bruno Mars, Kendrick Lamar: none of them received a headliner fee. The NFL covers production costs, and union-scale pay can apply, but there is no star paycheck for the show itself.

The halftime show can outdraw the game itself in some years, so performing for essentially no fee sounds absurd. The economics still work because the exposure spikes music sales: Nielsen has measured halftime performers’ digital track sales jumping sharply in the week after the show. The artists who play that stage show up again in our 43 music trivia questions.

14. Which Super Bowl is the only one decided by exactly 1 point? (Medium)

Answer: Super Bowl XXV (January 1991). The New York Giants beat the Buffalo Bills 20-19 when Scott Norwood’s 47-yard field goal attempt went wide right as time expired. It feels like there should have been several one-point Super Bowls by now. Through Super Bowl LX in February 2026, there has been exactly one.

15. How many footballs are provided for each team in the Super Bowl? (Hard)

Answer: 108 per team: 54 for practice, 54 for the game. About 120 balls actually get used on game day.

The usual guess: Ten? Twenty? The real number is huge because each team’s quarterbacks break in their own set, and the kicking balls are a separate batch handled by the officials.

16. What is the longest National Anthem performance in Super Bowl history? (Hard)

Answer: Alicia Keys, at about 2 minutes and 35 seconds during Super Bowl XLVII in 2013. Whitney Houston’s 1991 rendition is more famous and is the one most people name, but it ran about 1 minute 55 seconds. Keys added the difference with her piano arrangement.

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Quarterback Records Questions (17-23)

Quarterback records cluster around a few famous names, and that is the trap. When unsure, people default to Brady or Manning. None of the seven answers below is either of them.

Seven quarterback questions. Not one of the answers is Brady.

17. Whose first career completion was a pass to himself? (Medium)

Answer: Brett Favre. On September 13, 1992, his pass deflected off a Tampa Bay defender’s helmet and landed right back in his hands. He lost 7 yards on the play.

It smells like a trick question. A quarterback completing a pass to himself shouldn’t be physically possible, but a deflection doesn’t care.

18. Which QB was drafted first overall but couldn’t call plays in the huddle because of a stutter? (Hard)

Answer: Bobby Garrett, selected by the Cleveland Browns in the 1954 NFL Draft. He couldn’t say words that started with “S,” which ruled out calls like “split left” and “split right.”

The story has been almost completely forgotten. Garrett never became an NFL starter, and pre-combine scouting was thin enough that nobody caught the problem before draft day.

19. Who holds the record for most consecutive games with a touchdown pass? (Easy)

Answer: Drew Brees, with 54 consecutive games from 2009 to 2012.

The instinct is Brady, whose best streak reached 52 games. Peyton Manning got to 51. Brees outlasted both while drawing a fraction of the headlines.

20. Which quarterback never started a college game at quarterback but played 14 NFL seasons? (Medium)

Answer: Matt Cassel. He sat behind Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart at USC, threw only 33 passes in four college years, and made his lone college start at H-back rather than quarterback. He then lasted 14 seasons in the NFL, from 2005 to 2018.

The jump from career backup to franchise quarterback took exactly one injury. When Tom Brady’s knee gave out in 2008, Cassel stepped in, threw for 3,693 yards, and earned a $63 million contract from Kansas City.

21. How many career rushing yards does Lamar Jackson have, the most ever by a quarterback? (Medium)

Answer: Over 6,500 rushing yards through the 2025 season. Michael Vick’s old record of 6,109 stood for over a decade before Jackson passed it in December 2024.

Two things surprise here: that the record changed hands at all, and that Jackson broke it while still in his prime. The final number could end up far higher.

22. Which quarterback took the fewest sacks relative to his career length among all-time greats? (Hard)

Answer: Dan Marino, sacked only 270 times in 17 seasons. Other members of the 60,000-yard passing club averaged 474 career sacks. People remember Marino for the arm, not the escape artistry, yet his quick release kept roughly 200 hits off his career total compared with similar passers.

23. Who holds the record for most tackles by a quarterback? (Easy)

Answer: Joe Webb, with 29 career tackles from 2010 to 2020.

The question itself is the trap. Most people don’t realize quarterbacks accumulate tackle stats at all. Webb also played receiver and special teams, which explains the number.

Team Facts & Rivalries Questions (24-31)

Team questions reward tribal knowledge. Casual fans know their own franchise cold and little else, while the stories behind other cities’ teams (a corn starch company, midnight moving vans, a legal fiction in Cleveland) go unlearned. That gap is where these eight live.

24. What were the Chicago Bears originally called? (Easy)

Answer: The Decatur Staleys, from 1920 to 1921. The name came from the A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company, a corn starch business that sponsored the team. Nobody guesses that one of the NFL’s most storied franchises began as a food-processing company’s works team.

25. How did the Baltimore Colts move to Indianapolis? (Medium)

Answer: Owner Robert Irsay hired Mayflower moving trucks and relocated the entire franchise in the middle of the night on March 29, 1984.

It plays like an urban legend: a whole NFL franchise sneaking out of town at 2 AM in rented moving vans. It happened, and Baltimore went without a team until the Ravens arrived in 1996.

26. Why are the New York Jets called the “Jets”? (Easy)

Answer: Their home field at Shea Stadium was near LaGuardia Airport in Queens. The team was originally the Titans; new owners renamed them the Jets in 1963, and they moved into Shea, in the flight path of LaGuardia, the following year. The name sounds like it’s about speed. It’s about an airport.

27. Which NFL team holds the record for the longest losing streak? (Medium)

Answer: The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, with 26 consecutive losses from 1976 to 1977. They went 0-14 in their first season and kept losing deep into the second.

The number is staggering on its own. What makes it harder to guess is that the same franchise won a Super Bowl in 2002, so the memory of the misery has faded.

28. Which four NFL teams have never appeared in a Super Bowl? (Medium)

Answer: The Detroit Lions, Cleveland Browns, Houston Texans, and Jacksonville Jaguars, a list still intact after Super Bowl LX in February 2026. Eight more teams have appeared but never won, bringing the total without a title to 12.

Where guesses go wrong: Detroit and Cleveland are historic franchises with huge fanbases, so people assume they’ve made it at least once. The Lions have existed since 1930 and have zero appearances.

29. Which team was created when the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore? (Hard)

Answer: The Baltimore Ravens. The NFL kept the Browns’ name, history, and colors in Cleveland and reactivated the franchise in 1999, so the Ravens are technically an expansion team built from the old Browns’ roster.

The legal arrangement is confusing by design. Art Modell moved his players to Baltimore, the “Cleveland Browns” officially stayed behind, and Cleveland got a brand-new team wearing the same uniforms and carrying the same records as if nothing had happened.

30. Which NFL city has two teams that share the same stadium? (Easy)

Answer: New York. The Giants and Jets both play at MetLife Stadium, which isn’t in New York at all but in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The two-teams part is easy; the New Jersey part is what catches people.

31. Which NFL franchise is the oldest? (Hard)

Answer: The Arizona Cardinals, founded in 1898 as the Morgan Athletic Club on the South Side of Chicago. The team has played in three cities: Chicago, St. Louis, and Arizona.

Nobody associates the Cardinals with “oldest anything.” The Bears, Packers, and Giants feel older because their histories are more celebrated, but the Cardinals predate the NFL itself by 22 years.

Rules You Didn’t Know Questions (32-38)

Nobody reads the rulebook, which runs past 100 pages. That’s what makes this section dangerous: several of these rules sound invented, and all seven are real. Fans who can recite stats for hours still hesitate when a question asks what the book actually says.

Seven real rules, including the free kick nobody uses.

32. Is the drop kick still legal in the NFL? (Easy)

Answer: Yes. Doug Flutie drop-kicked an extra point for the New England Patriots on January 1, 2006, the first successful drop kick in a regular-season game since 1941.

Sixty-four years passed between successful attempts. The play is legal but so impractical that almost nobody tries it. Flutie did it in the final game of his career, largely to prove it could still be done.

33. What happens if a team isn’t on the field 10 minutes before the scheduled kickoff? (Medium)

Answer: They can lose the coin toss for both halves and take a 15-yard penalty on the opening kickoff. Nobody reads the pre-game section of the NFL Rulebook, and losing a coin toss as a punishment sounds too petty to be true. It’s in there.

34. Can a fair catch result in a free kick attempt at a field goal? (Hard)

Answer: Yes. After a fair catch, the receiving team can attempt an uncontested field goal from the spot of the catch. No defenders can rush. It’s essentially a free shot at three points.

The fair-catch kick has been used only a handful of times in NFL history. The situations where it makes sense (a fair catch in range as a half expires) are rare enough that most coaches never consider it.

35. What is the “one-point safety” and has it ever happened in the NFL? (Hard)

Answer: It occurs when the defense scores a safety during an extra point or two-point conversion attempt, awarding a single point. It has never happened in an NFL game, though it has occurred in college football.

The play is so unlikely that it exists mostly as a theoretical curiosity. A game could, in principle, end 1-0.

36. Is a player allowed to wear the number 0 in the NFL? (Easy)

Answer: Yes, since a 2023 rule change. Before that, jersey number 0 had been banned for decades, long enough that most fans stopped questioning it.

37. Can an NFL team score 2 points on a defensive play during an extra point attempt? (Hard)

Answer: Yes. Since 2015, if the defense intercepts or recovers a fumble during a conversion attempt and returns it to the opposite end zone, it scores 2 points.

Why people miss it: Before 2015, defenders simply gave up on conversion turnovers because there was nothing to gain. The incentive is new enough that many fans never re-learned the play.

38. How long does a team have to snap the ball after the play clock starts? (Medium)

Answer: 40 seconds after the previous play ends, or 25 seconds after certain administrative stoppages such as timeouts and penalties. Exceeding either draws a delay-of-game penalty.

Almost everyone says 30 seconds. The real numbers are 40 and 25, and the distinction between the two clocks rarely registers during a broadcast.

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Draft Day Surprises Questions (39-45)

The draft is where scouting meets luck. The first pick in draft history chose foam rubber over football, a Hall of Famer went completely unpicked, and one team sent the wrong name to the podium. Seven questions, seven reminders that nobody actually knows.

From a quiet hotel ballroom in 1936 to a three-day television event.

39. What happened to Jay Berwanger, the very first NFL draft pick in history? (Medium)

Answer: He turned down pro football to become a foam rubber salesman. The Philadelphia Eagles drafted him first overall in 1936 and traded his rights to the Chicago Bears. Berwanger asked for $1,000 per game, the Bears said no, and he went into business.

The first pick in NFL history choosing rubber over football sounds like satire. He also wasn’t alone: only 24 of the 81 players drafted in 1936 ever played an NFL game.

40. Which NFL team accidentally drafted the wrong player? (Easy)

Answer: The Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1982. They intended to take defensive end Booker Reese, but a draft-room mix-up sent guard Sean Farrell’s name to the podium instead. A slip that belongs in an office happened in a war room with millions on the line.

41. What is “Mr. Irrelevant” in the NFL Draft? (Easy)

Answer: The nickname for the last player selected in the entire draft, a tradition that started in 1976 with wide receiver Kelvin Kirk. The name is the trick. The last pick gets a week of celebrations in Newport Beach, California, and some go on to real careers: kicker Ryan Succop, the 2009 Mr. Irrelevant, played 14 NFL seasons and won a Super Bowl with Tampa Bay.

42. How many rounds did the original NFL Draft have? (Medium)

Answer: 9 rounds in 1936. The draft ballooned to as many as 32 rounds in 1943, when wartime rosters needed constant replenishing (each of the ten teams picked 30 players that year), and has settled at 7 rounds and roughly 260 picks today. Nobody expects the 32; guesses usually land near the modern number.

43. Which Hall of Fame quarterback went completely undrafted? (Medium)

Answer: Kurt Warner. He stocked shelves at a Hy-Vee grocery store for $5.50 an hour, played Arena Football, then won two NFL MVPs and Super Bowl XXXIV with the Rams. Tony Romo also went undrafted.

People remember the grocery store but forget he was completely undrafted, not a late-round flier. The 1994 draft ran 222 picks and included nine quarterbacks. Warner wasn’t one of them.

44. What is the fastest 40-yard dash time ever recorded at the NFL Scouting Combine? (Hard)

Answer: 4.21 seconds, set by wide receiver Xavier Worthy in 2024 and still standing after the 2026 combine. Worthy edged John Ross’s 2017 record of 4.22 by a single hundredth, and the mark is widely considered close to the physical ceiling for a 40-yard start from a football stance.

45. Where was the first NFL Draft held, and how different was it from today? (Hard)

Answer: The Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia, on February 8, 1936. No television, no fans, no fanfare. Team owners sat around a table and called out names.

The contrast is the surprise. The same event now fills stadiums, draws tens of millions of viewers, and takes three days.

Stadium & Game Day Questions (46-53)

The last set covers cow leather, decibel records, and a referee’s frozen whistle. None of it lives in the usual stats-and-scores file. You can memorize every quarterback record and still have no idea a football weighs less than a pound.

Game day by the numbers: 142.2 decibels, 11 minutes of live ball, 3,000 cows.

46. Which NFL stadium is the largest by standard seating capacity? (Easy)

Answer: MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, with a standard capacity of 82,500, shared by the Giants and Jets. AT&T Stadium in Dallas looks bigger on TV because of its retractable roof and giant video board, but MetLife holds more people in fixed seats.

47. Which NFL stadium holds the Guinness World Record for loudest crowd noise? (Easy)

Answer: Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Kansas City Chiefs, at 142.2 decibels. That’s louder than a jet engine at takeoff, which sits around 140 dB.

The trap: Seattle’s Lumen Field (formerly CenturyLink) is famous for crowd noise, so most people guess it first. Arrowhead took the record in 2014 and has held it since.

48. How much does an official NFL football weigh? (Medium)

Answer: Between 14 and 15 ounces, just under one pound, inflated to between 12.5 and 13.5 PSI.

Everyone guesses heavier. The ball feels substantial in the hands, but it barely weighs a pound. The PSI spec became famous during the 2015 “Deflategate” controversy.

49. What is the “Terrible Towel” and who created it? (Easy)

Answer: A gold terrycloth towel waved by Pittsburgh Steelers fans, created in 1975 by broadcaster Myron Cope as a rally gimmick. Proceeds from sales go to the Allegheny Valley School, a facility for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

People know the towel and not the man. Cope’s son attended the Allegheny Valley School, which is why he directed the royalties there.

50. How many minutes of actual ball-in-play action are in a typical NFL game? (Hard)

Answer: About 11 minutes, inside an average broadcast of 3 hours and 12 minutes. The rest is huddles, replays, timeouts, commercials, and clock management.

Guesses land at 45, maybe 30 on the low end. Eleven feels insulting, until you start timing the live ball yourself and it checks out.

51. How many officials are on the field during an NFL game? (Medium)

Answer: Seven: referee, umpire, down judge, line judge, field judge, side judge, and back judge. Everyone undercounts, because the referee is the only one who ever talks; the other six work in silence.

52. What is the coldest NFL game ever played? (Hard)

Answer: The “Ice Bowl”, the 1967 NFL Championship Game between the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys. Kickoff temperature: -13F (-25C), with a wind chill of -48F (-44C).

People guess games from the 1990s or 2000s because those are fresher in memory. Nothing since has matched it. Referee Norm Schachter reported that his metal whistle froze to his lips.

53. How many cows does it take to supply the NFL with footballs for one season? (Hard)

Answer: About 3,000 cows. Wilson Sporting Goods makes every official NFL game ball by hand in Ada, Ohio, and each cowhide yields about 10 footballs. Nobody expects a cow count in a football quiz, which is exactly why this one ends the list.

The Part Where You Forget All of This

Skim this list today and the Ice Bowl temperature is gone by Sunday. That isn’t a football problem, it’s a memory problem. In the classic testing effect study, students who tested themselves retained about 80 percent of the material a week later; students who only reread it kept 36 percent.

Being forced to pull an answer cold is the whole trick. It’s also the mechanic LearnClash is built around: miss the Steagles question in a duel and spaced repetition brings it back at widening intervals until you stop missing it. The questions you already own stay out of your way.

Start a football trivia duel →

If football is only one of your lanes, the 47 basketball trivia questions run the same format for the NBA, and the full trivia questions collection gathers 800+ questions across 25 topics.