Monday is the 75th anniversary of the most bewildering record in sports that has somehow stood the test of time. On September 28, 1951, Norm Van Brocklin threw for an NFL record 554 passing yards at LA Memorial Coliseum for the Los Angeles Rams against the New York Yankees. The previous record was 468 pass yards by Johnny Lujack.
Now, 75 years and over 15,000 games later, the record still stands. It has withstood 26 more 500-yard passing games, including 17 in the past 15 years. It hasn't been broken despite the arms of Dan Marino, John Elway, Brett Favre, Steve Young, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes taking their best shots.
It predates the moon landing, the first Super Bowl, even Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game. It's unfathomable that a passing record from 1951 has not been broken in the most favorable passing era in league history. At the end of 1951, the all-time passing leader was Sammy Baugh with 21,734 yards.
Today, Baugh ranks 108th all-time, and Tom Brady stands as the leader with 89,214. And how exactly did we get here? Norm Van Brocklin was only starting the season opener in 1951 because he was in a quarterback battle with Bob Waterfield (a Hall of Famer like Van Brocklin), but Waterfield was hurt for Week 1.
He was playing on a high-powered Rams offense that set an NFL record with 38.8 points per game in 1950 — another record that still stands today. He threw for 335 of his 554 yards to a pair of Hall of Famers, Tom Fears and "Crazy Legs" Hirsch. It was a perfect storm between an offensive juggernaut and an opponent in the New York Yanks (not the baseball team) that was playing in its last season of existence.
They had zero pass rush and were no match for Van Brocklin's barrage of deep balls, even in an era when you could grab and shove receivers downfield. "We didn't rush him at all," George Taliaferro, a halfback, quarterback and defensive back for the Yanks, told the NY Times in 2011. "We didn't have that kind of a defense, so he could sit in the pocket and let it go.
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