NFL trivia quiz

How to play the NFL quiz

Hit Play the quiz and you get ten random questions, each with four answers in shuffled order. Pick one and the right answer lights up green, with a one-line explanation, so you learn something even when you miss. Your score shows at the end along with the questions you got wrong. “Play again” draws ten new ones, and your best score is saved on your device.

Use the menu to stick to one topic: Super Bowl, Records and legends, Rules, or Franchise history. Question list shows all the NFL trivia on one page with the answers hidden, which is what you want if you are hosting.

How to run NFL trivia at a game-day party

Trivia fills the pregame hour, halftime or the gap between the early and late games. A format that works:

1. Split into teams of two to five. Each team gets a sheet and a pen; phones face down.
2. Four quarters of five questions, one quarter per topic. Read each question twice and give 30 seconds.
3. Score like football: a correct answer is a “touchdown” worth 6 points. Add a 1-point “extra point” bonus question at the end of each quarter, using a Rules question.
4. Halftime marking: swap sheets and read out the answers with the explanations.
5. Overtime tie-breaker: one numeric question, closest answer wins. Emmitt Smith’s career rushing total (18,355 yards) works well because few people know it exactly.

Worked example: the scoreboard

Four quarters of five questions at 6 points each is 120 points, plus four extra-point questions at 1 point each, so the maximum is 124. A team that gets 4, 3, 5 and 2 right and makes three extra points finishes on (4 + 3 + 5 + 2) × 6 + 3 = 87. If two teams tie at 87, go to the overtime question: a guess of 18,000 yards (355 away) beats a guess of 17,500 (855 away).

How the questions were chosen

Good NFL trivia needs answers that do not move. We wrote every question around one of four kinds of fact:

• Super Bowl results that are in the books, from Super Bowl I in January 1967 to Super Bowl LVII in 2023.
• Records set by retired players, or records tied to the season they were set (“in 1984, who ran for 2,105 yards?”). We left out career records that active players are still chasing.
• The rules as they stand in the NFL rulebook: 11 players, four downs, 10 yards, 6 points for a touchdown, the 15-yard extra-point snap since 2015. We skipped the kickoff rules, which have changed several times recently.
• Franchise history: the Colts leaving Baltimore, the Browns becoming the Ravens, the Raiders in Las Vegas.

Each question has one right answer and three wrong ones taken from the same era: if the answer is a 1970s running back, the other options are 1970s running backs too.

How we tested

The quiz runs on one small engine, and we wrote automated Node tests for it (tests/quiz.test.js) and ran them before publishing. They read the question list straight from this page's source and check that:

• all 50 questions have a unique id and no question appears twice;
• every question has exactly four different options, and the correct answer is one of them;
• a round always contains 10 different questions, and a second round avoids the questions from the first while enough are left;
• after the options are shuffled, the engine still knows which button is right: in 600 test rounds (6,000 shuffled questions) per quiz the correct answer landed in each of the four positions about a quarter of the time, and was always the one marked correct;
• the score counts only right answers (all right gives 10/10, all wrong gives 0/10, and answering the same question twice is ignored).

Facts were checked separately. Questions were written from well-known NFL history. Figures we wanted to double-check were confirmed with web sources, including the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Emmitt Smith’s 18,355 career rushing yards, Don Shula’s 347 wins (including 19 in the playoffs) and Roger Staubach’s 1975 pass that made “Hail Mary” popular. A question about Tom Brady’s career touchdown total was dropped because the sources we found did not agree on whether the figure included the playoffs.

Every question was then reviewed a second time in a separate fact-check pass, and the details we doubted were checked against Wikipedia and news reports. That pass reworded the extra-point question to ask about the 2015 rule change itself.

Those are the only tests we ran: we have not tried the quiz with groups of players or on a range of phones, so if something looks wrong, please tell us.