Talk:List of 500-yard passing games in the NFL

Misleading records
At least a couple of the "NFL records" listed in the Notes column are misleading. For example, the Manning/Garcia marks for completion percentages are only records among games in which a QB has 400+ yards, while simply saying "NFL Record:" implies that no one's done better (after all, the most accurate passing performance in NFL history, regular season or postseason, was Tom Brady against Jacksonville last year). They need to be either clarified or removed. Samer (talk) 14:18, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Missing QB
Tom Terrific threw for 410 yards against KC on 9-22-02, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com and NFL.com IdioT.SavanT.i4 (talk) 06:23, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Super Bowl LI
Where's Tom Brady's game? I thought for sure it would be up by now. EricMonWiki (talk) 05:10, 6 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Not missing, see game 170. This thing is complete 100%. Smk42 (talk) 08:50, 17 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm going to assume sarcasm. The one from 02/05/17. Super Bowl LI — Preceding unsigned comment added by EricMonWiki (talk • contribs) 05:12, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Are you wearing your glasses? Lizard  (talk) 05:16, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Oh. When I went to the edit page it was there. Something must be wrong on my end.EricMonWiki (talk) 05:39, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I had created it, but had it hidden until the exact numbers were announced. ~ Dissident93  ( talk ) 08:21, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Consecutive 400 Yards Games
Whoever put Kerry Collins on here is very confused. Not only has Collins not thrown for 400 yards in consecutive games; he has in fact NEVER thrown for 400 yards in his entire career. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.86.231.25 (talk) 23:28, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

If post-season games are considered (as in the Drew Brees case), then Kurt Warner should be added to this list. He achieved 400+ passing yards in Super Bowl XXIV and then in the first game of the 2000-2001 season. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.174.71.96 (talk) 23:55, 18 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Done (added Kurt Warner). --Racerx11 (talk) 04:05, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Page Relevancy Rapidly Declining
As the NFL transforms into a more and more pass-heavy league, would it be radical to say that 400-yard passing games is growing ever inane and that this page will be completely irrelevant in the very near future? There are six in a decade span from 1943 to 1953, and five within two weeks in 2012... 130.160.181.196 (talk) 22:53, 7 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Why would it be irrelevant? They may have become more common, but they are still relatively rare compared to the total number of games in NFL history. Also, stats within the game are relevant, for instance Matthew Stafford just had a game of 443 yards.... but zero TDs, which is an NFL record.Planeis (talk) 22:45, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Matthew Stafford
I updated a few stats about Matthew Stafford in the charts. He was alternately referred to as having 4 400-yard games in some places, or I think 3 in one chart. According to my count he now has 6. I updated a few of the charts to reflect this. If this is incorrect please let me know. I also updated the list of all 400-yard games relating to Stafford to note that his game on 12.22.2012 is the most yards (443) by an NFL quarterback without a TD. According to my study of the big chart, the previous record holder was Joe Montana who had a game in November of 1986 where he threw for 441 yards and 0 TDs.Planeis (talk) 22:51, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Rapidly losing significance
To revive an older discussion from 2012: passing for 400 yards in a game is quickly becoming commonplace in the league. Guys like Brees and Matt Ryan seem to do it every other week, and then there's the young guns like Derek Carr and Kirk Cousins. We recently deleted List of most career 300-yard passing games in the NFL because it was getting lengthy. Not to mention the article is currently inadequately sourced per WP:LISTN; none of the sources describe these as a group or set. Soon, we might wanna consider trimming this down to "500 or more" instead of 400 and changing the title accordingly. Lizard (talk) 01:30, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't be against it. ~ Dissident93  ( talk ) 19:57, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
 * We could probably even create a List of most career 400-yard passing games in the NFL to replace the 300-yard one that was deleted. Lizard  (talk) 20:25, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I think this page just needs better organization. For example, group things in decades or two decades, then, because they're more frequent now, group in individual years. This would be so that you could go to each section in the table of contents so you wouldn't have to scroll down 300+ cells each time. —Bigmoe797 (talk) 00:22, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
 * It's still a violator of WP:INDISCRIMINATE though. ~ Dissident93  ( talk )  —Preceding undated comment added 05:51, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Yeh, definitely indiscriminate. We're sourcing each instance with a link to the players' game logs on PFR and other stats sites. We should instead cite the news stories that prove this article is worth keeping, e.g. "Derek Carr passes for 4xx yards in Raiders win". Fox Sports. We're only satisfying verifiability and not notability. Lizard  (talk) 23:30, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Better citing alternative
So, in the article, each game is cited individually but you can just make an almost identical list like this one on pro-football-reference. It seems like it would save a lot of bytes and potentially make the page work faster to cite only that. Just a suggestion. Bigmoe797 (talk) 02:02, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I did some calculations, and accounting for references being used more than once, ~130 bytes per citation, and ~300 citations, I got roughly 40,000 bytes—about 40% of the article's current size. Bigmoe797 (talk) 02:12, 30 December 2016 (UTC)
 * We'll probably cut it down to 500-yard games soon, which can all definitely be cited individually. 400-yard games are so commonplace that the article is becoming comically large. Lizard  (talk) 02:23, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Trim the notes
The table can go from ridiculously large to only very large if we took some of the garbage out of the "Notes" column. Such as the listing of how many postseason 400-yard games there's been up to that point for each postseason entry (which for some reason is written in a #000 format). And since-broken records. And miscellaneous facts that are out of scope for this article ("First QB to throw for 6 TDs and lose the game"). Lizard (talk) 00:50, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Agreed 100%. I've been meaning to do something like this for years, but never started due to the sheer amount of tedious work it would take (and inevitably reverted by somebody without good reasons for keeping it). Honestly, this entire article could just be deleted, as it's simply a mass collection of somewhat non-notable sports statistics information (WP:IINFO) better hosted by some other platform like PFR. I think your proposal from last year could work otherwise, I.E. we make this a list of 500 yard quarterbacks, which is much more rare and notable. ~ Dissident93  ( talk ) 01:35, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it'd be a pretty drastic change to cut it to 500-yard games (20 entries instead of 333) but oh well. And there currently hasn't been any playoff 500-yard games, but if there ever are, they should be left out or separate from the list. As is customary with all stats. Also I shortened comp. to cmp for the sake of space. Lizard  (talk) 01:55, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Now add Stafford to the list again. On and on it grows. Lizard  (talk) 03:20, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
 * And it will continue to expand over time (as sports stats do), so eventually we need to decide on one of the two proposals. ~ Dissident93  ( talk ) 05:20, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
 * It looks so much cleaner without that gigantic notes column. Good call on nuking it. Lizard  (talk) 17:41, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Wasn't aware until recently that VisualEditor has the ability to remove columns at the click of a button, which is what prevented me from doing so months ago. I might just go ahead and still do the 500-yard passers only if nobody objects in the next week or so. ~ Dissident93 (talk) 21:16, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I haven't visited this page for a while, so I didn't follow this discussion as it was going on... but honestly I liked the notes. FinalForm (talk) 14:18, 24 August 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm not saying they weren't helpful to some degree, but were they actually encyclopedic? That's where I don't agree. ~ Dissident93 (talk) 15:50, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

Separate regular season and postseason games
We should separate regular season and postseason games, as is standard when discussing stats not only in the NFL but any pro sports league. This would eliminate the need for shading postseason games and solve the issue of what color to shade a 500-yard postseason game, like Brady's in the last Super Bowl. Lizard (talk) 04:17, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I just realized how much of a pain this would be because of how poorly the table is formatted... Lizard  (talk) 04:25, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I still propose to just eliminate all sub-500 yard games. 400 yard games happen so often now that it's not that notable anymore, and simply maintaining this list is a mess on top of that. And didn't we used to have a 300 yard list too that got removed for similar reasons? ~ Dissident93 (talk) 20:33, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Edit: That being said, I did some majors clean ups on the list until we decide what to do with it. ~ Dissident93 (talk) 21:21, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes there was a list of 300-yard games (and I'm not sure why; those have never been rare). Actually what was deleted was List of most career 300-yard passing games in the NFL. As for trimming to 500-yard games, does WP:NTEMP come into play here? 400-yard games used to be noteworthy but now not so much. Pinging, my trusty lifeline. Lizard  (talk) 21:52, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
 * That's the one (that I apparently nominated myself), it was even more of a mess than this article was. And yeah, WP:NTEMP could be used here. I'd also argue that we should be using third-party sourcing instead of just PFR gamelogs, which passes WP:V but not WP:N. 500 yard games would almost certainly have articles remarking on it, but would every 400-yard game? ~ <b style="color: #660000;">Dissident93</b> (<b style="color: #D18719;">talk</b>) 22:16, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
 * There's also the issue of WP:LISTN; lists are considered notable if they've been discussed in independent sources as a group or set. I don't see any such sources in this article. Lizard  (talk) 22:38, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
 * These 1, 2, 3, 4 could probably pass WP:LISTN. If you search for 400-yard passers, a lot of them just link back here. ~ <b style="color: #660000;">Dissident93</b> (<b style="color: #D18719;">talk</b>) 00:11, 8 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah that's pretty indisputable. 500+ definitely passes LISTN. The sources I can find for 400+ are sketchy at best. Lizard  (talk) 00:27, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Second thoughts about trimming to 500-yard list
I'm thinking we should just keep it at 400. When you think about it, it's only happened 309 times in 74 NFL regular seasons. Yes, only. There's 512 games a year with 2 quarterbacks playing in each game, so there's 1,024 chances for it to happen each season and yet it only happened 8 times this season. Although it does feel like it happens a lot more frequently. And I think there are sources to satisfy WP:LISTN, even if just barely. The Pro Football Hall of Fame says 400 yards is "the gold standard of a quarterback’s ability to air it out". The book Strong Arm Tactics: A History and Statistical Analysis of the Professional Quarterback has a list of 400-yard games through 2006 (although before machines like Brees, Big Ben, and Stafford, still relatively recent). Although I'm not sure how reliable, this site also has a list of 400-yard games. Additionally, we can also discuss how 400-yard games have become more prevalent and are seen as less of an accomplishment as they used to be. "400-yard passers are almost becoming commonplace in the NFL", "When it comes to passing yardage, 400 is the new 300", "The 400-yard passing game is no longer special". Ironically, these sources implying that 400-yard games aren't notable actually serve to support that they are notable. Lizard (talk) 01:28, 10 February 2018 (UTC) And the change is complete. What I plan to do soon is find a real source for each game instead of just relying on Pro Football Reference if possible, which adds more notability to it. ~ <b style="color: #660000;">Dissident93</b> (<b style="color: #D18719;">talk</b>) 07:40, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
 * If the citations can be improved, then I'm all for keeping it at 400. The PFR citations should all be replaced whenever possible. ~ <b style="color: #660000;">Dissident93</b> (<b style="color: #D18719;">talk</b>) 05:07, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Do you still think this list is notable? Because we've had six 400 yard games just 2 weeks into this season. I might just WP:BEBOLD and change this to a 500 yard list later this week. ~ <b style="color: #660000;">Dissident93</b> (<b style="color: #D18719;">talk</b>) 21:05, 16 September 2018 (UTC)
 * No arguments from me. Lizard  (talk) 19:08, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Just adding that there were five 400 yard games just this week alone (with still Mahomes yet to play). At this point, 400 yard games are nearly guaranteed to happen weekly. ~ <b style="color: #660000;">Dissident93</b> (<b style="color: #D18719;">talk</b>) 05:57, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

Redirect from List of 400 yard passing games in the National Football League
Why does this redirect here? There is a link for 400 yard passing games at Jake Plummer. Since his record is 499 yards, I was going to remove it, but a 400 yard passing games would make a notable article, so a red link could remain at the Plummer article. I don't know how to remove a redirect and don't know why it implemented. Thanks. Henry Hannon (talk) 20:56, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
 * The scope of this article got changed recently because we were having 400 yard games weekly, on top of an already bloated article. The 400 yard link on Plummer's page should be removed. ~ <b style="color: #660000;">Dissident93</b> (<b style="color: #D18719;">talk</b>) 22:03, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
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