Amazing Facts About the NFL

If you enjoy watching the NFL games every week, you might feel as if you've got an excellent working knowledge of the game. But the NFL has so much more to offer than just the regular games every week. 

If you look back over the history of the sport, there are some truly amazing facts about the games and the players. Here's a selection of three snippets that are guaranteed to fascinate any NFL fan.

In 1958, the Championship Game was taking place between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants in a match which is often known as "the greatest game ever played". The days of media coverage were still in their infancy, and NBC was desperate to win the NFL contract. 

They were broadcasting the game to the nation when it reached a critical point. In an audacious series of moves, the Colts reached the Yankees eight-yard line and called time-out. The next move was pretty certain to win the game (which it did), but the celebrations in the crowd disconnected the NBC cables. 

Desperate not to miss broadcasting the end of the match, NBC sent an employee onto the field. Stan Rotkiewicz, a statistician for NBC, pretended to be a drunk who wanted to disrupt the game.  Racing up and down the field, chased by police officers, Stan Rotkiewicz was eventually taken down and marched off. The goal was to buy NBC enough time to repair the cables so that once the game recommenced, viewers at home would be able to watch. 

The strategy worked, and the Colts went on to win, but the truth about Stan Rotkiewicz's identity leaked out. But even then, Johnny Unitas refused to believe it because Rotkiewicz put on such a good performance!

The playoff between the Chicago Bears and the Philadelphia Eagles took place on 31 December 1988, but the weather conditions were so bad it eventually became known as the Fog Bowl. The game started without a problem, but a thick fog had rolled over the field, by the second quarter, cutting visibility to no more than 15-20 yards. The dense fog didn't lift for the whole game, and players complained that they couldn't see either the first-down markers or the sidelines. 

In the third quarter, the fog had thickened by so much that players had to resort to a running game because it was impossible for the receivers to see the long passes in time.

But it wasn’t just the players who were struggling to see; radio commentators and TV announcers couldn’t see what was going on, and the fans in the stadium were just staring into the fog. To combat the problem, referee Jim Tunney resorted to announcing each play on his microphone so that the crowd knew what was going on!

The NFL were well aware of the weather conditions but apparently never considered cancelling the game because there was no danger to players, unlike rain or snow.

Born in 1962, Herschel Walker had a long and glittering career for teams such as the Dallas Cowboys, Minnesota Vikings, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants, appearing in the All-Pro, Pro-Bowl and winning MVP in 1985.

His phenomenal record on the field hid the fact that Walker was suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, a condition previously known as multiple personality disorder. It worsened after retiring from football, but Walker has since confessed that there are many things that happened that he simply has no working memory of. With "alters" taking charge of his body at times, critical moments of his life are blank. One such example is the time he received the Heisman Trophy; Walker knows that he won it but has absolutely no recollections of the day at all.