Exhibition Only: The Most Notable Preseason Games the NFL Never Forgot
Published on August 6th, 2026Written By: Dave Manuel
The NFL preseason opens tonight, and the standard line about it is that none of it counts. That is true in the narrow sense that no result below appears in a single standings table. It is also, on the evidence, badly incomplete. The largest crowd ever to watch an NFL game - any NFL game, exhibition or regular season or Super Bowl - turned out for a preseason game in Mexico City. A preseason game got a Giants head coach fired before the season began. A preseason game produced sixty-six points from one team and a joke about giving a horse a heart attack. One preseason game changed what the flag means at American sporting events, and another one paralysed a man in front of fifty thousand people and rewrote the rulebook. These are the games that did not count, ranked by what they actually did: what happened, who starred, and what was left behind when the summer ended. Eleven nights, no standings, and not one of them forgotten.
Sports-King Feature
The Games That Didn't Count
The largest crowd in NFL history. A head coach sacked in August. Sixty-six points in a game nobody recorded. Eleven preseason nights the league never managed to forget.
ExhibitionSeason Opens TonightTHE PRESEASON FILE
Games11RANKED
Largest Crowd, Any NFL Game112,376
Most Points, One Team66
Consecutive Summers, Jets-Giants51
Coaches Fired Over One1
A preseason game is a strange object. The tickets cost real money, the injuries are real injuries, the crowd is often enormous, and the result is thrown away the moment the whistle blows. That combination has produced a genuinely peculiar history: because nothing is at stake, coaches experiment, leagues stage games in places they would never risk a real one, and players occasionally do things they would not do under the weight of a standings table. What follows is ranked by consequence rather than by quality of football, because the quality of football in August is not the point and never has been. Some of these games were spectacles. One of them was a catastrophe. Two changed the sport permanently, and one of those two was not really about football at all.
01
ExhibitionQualcomm Stadium · San Diego49ERS at CHARGERS
LegacyA KNEE1 SEP 2016
The most consequential preseason game ever played produced no memorable football whatsoever. Colin Kaepernick had already sat through the anthem at San Francisco's first three exhibition games that August; he did not dress for the first two, and at the third - against Green Bay on August 26 - exactly one reporter noticed. Asked about it afterwards, he said he would not stand to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour, and that it would be selfish to look the other way. The story took a day to catch fire. Then Nate Boyer, a former Green Beret who had also been an NFL long snapper, wrote him an open letter arguing that kneeling would read differently from sitting: people take a knee to pray, to propose, to be knighted, and at the graves of friends. On September 1, in San Diego, on the Chargers' annual Salute to the Military night, Kaepernick knelt. Safety Eric Reid knelt beside him, the first team-mate to join. Boyer stood to his left, hand over heart, singing. Most of the stadium booed. Kaepernick pledged a million dollars to community organisations that night. Every argument American sport has had since about protest, patriotism and employment traces back to a game that did not count.
02
ExhibitionOakland Coliseum · CaliforniaPATRIOTS at RAIDERS
LegacyRULESCHANGED
Running a crossing pattern over the middle in the second quarter, New England receiver Darryl Stingley lunged for a pass that fell incomplete. Oakland safety Jack Tatum, bearing down from the opposite direction, met him while he was off balance and leaning forward. The collision fractured and dislocated Stingley's fourth and fifth vertebrae and left him a quadriplegic. He was twenty-six, and he had come to Oakland for a game that appeared in no record book. Tatum, nicknamed the Assassin and possessed of a reputation built entirely on collisions like that one, never apologised; he tried to visit the hospital days later and was turned away by Stingley's family, and the two men never spoke again. Stingley regained limited movement, spent the rest of his life in an electric wheelchair and died in 2007 at fifty-five. Tatum died three years later, still insisting he had done nothing outside the rules, which under the rules of 1978 was true. The most generous verdict on the whole business came from Stingley himself, who said years afterwards that the best thing to come out of it was that officiating changed around excessive violence, and that the game opened up for receivers as a result. Every rule the NFL has written since about defenceless players traces back through that night.
03
ExhibitionEstadio Azteca · Mexico CityOILERS vs COWBOYS
Final6-0ALL FIELD GOALS
One hundred and twelve thousand, three hundred and seventy-six people. That is more than any Super Bowl has ever drawn, more than any regular-season game in the history of the league, and they came to watch an exhibition in which the reigning Most Valuable Player did not play. Emmitt Smith had been expected to make his preseason debut and sat out over muddy conditions. The Cowboys were the defending Super Bowl champions and did not score. Every point in the game came off the foot of Houston kicker Al Del Greco, who converted from 38 and 26 yards in the first half and then watched his defence hold. It was the first NFL game ever played in Mexico, staged under the American Bowl banner, and it remains the high-water mark for attendance at professional football anywhere. Azteca now holds three of the five largest crowds ever assembled for an NFL game. A 6-0 exhibition tops the list.
04
ExhibitionYale Bowl · New Haven, ConnecticutJETS vs GIANTS
Final37-14COACH FIRED
Seven months after Super Bowl III, the Jets and Giants met for the first time in their history, and the entire city of New York treated an exhibition as a referendum. Joe Namath threw three touchdown passes, including a 29-yard strike to George Sauer for the opening score. Game balls went to Don Maynard, Bill Mathis and Larry Grantham, three original Titans who had also played in the Super Bowl. More than seventy thousand people watched the upstart league's champions dismantle the establishment club, and the establishment club responded by sacking its head coach: Allie Sherman, who had taken the Giants to multiple championship games earlier in the decade, was fired over a game that did not count. The teams then played every summer for fifty-one consecutive years, the longest such streak in the sport, a run broken only when the pandemic cancelled the 2020 preseason outright.
05
ExhibitionMunicipal Stadium · Kansas CityCHIEFS vs BEARS
Final66-24RECORD
The most points any team has scored in an NFL preseason game, and the context makes it far more than a curiosity. Lamar Hunt's Chiefs met George Halas's Bears at Municipal Stadium on August 23, 1967, seven months after Kansas City had lost the first Super Bowl to Green Bay and been informed at length that the junior league did not belong on the same field. Hank Stram's team scored thirty-two points in the second quarter alone and sixty-six in total - still the most points the franchise has scored in any game, preseason or otherwise - including its first two-point conversion, off a fake extra point. Willie Lanier, a rookie that year, later said it was the night he understood how seriously his team had taken the Super Bowl defeat. The Chiefs' mascot was a live horse named War Paint who galloped the length of the field after every touchdown, which by the fourth quarter had become its own endurance event. Halas, watching the animal work, remarked that if they scored any more points they were going to give the horse a heart attack. He also called the night a black eye for the NFL. Three years later the leagues merged.
06
ExhibitionWembley Stadium · LondonBEARS vs COWBOYS
Final17-6LONDON BUILT
The reigning Super Bowl champion Bears against the Cowboys at Wembley, and the beginning of everything the NFL now does overseas. The American Bowl series ran from 1986 to 2005 and staged forty preseason games across the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Canada, Japan, Mexico and Australia. It was, in the league's own framing, a marketing exercise - but it worked, creating a British audience that eventually demanded games that counted. The series also showed its limits: by 1993 a Cowboys-Lions preseason tie at Wembley drew 45,000 and falling, because the novelty had worn off and fans had begun asking for the real thing. They got it. Every sold-out regular-season fixture in London traces directly back to an exhibition played in the summer of 1986.
07
ExhibitionNeyland Stadium · Knoxville, TennesseeSTEELERS vs PATRIOTS
Crowd93,251US RECORD, SB ERA
Ninety-three thousand people filled a college stadium in a state that had no NFL franchise, to watch two teams from Pittsburgh and Foxborough play a game that meant nothing, and it stands as the largest American crowd for a preseason game in the Super Bowl era. The entry earns its place partly as a corrective, because this record gets misreported constantly - when a Rams-Cowboys exhibition drew a huge crowd at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 2016 it was widely billed as the biggest preseason gate in United States history, and researchers pointed out immediately that it was not close: three College All-Star Games in the 1940s topped a hundred thousand, a Redskins-Rams charity game in 1950 drew 95,625, and Knoxville had beaten it three decades earlier. Tennessee got its own team fifteen years later. The appetite had been demonstrated in August.
08
ExhibitionUllevi Stadium · Gothenburg, SwedenVIKINGS vs BEARS
Final28-21ONE OF ONE
Some records can never be broken because nobody will try again. The Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears played at Ullevi Stadium in Gothenburg in August 1988, in an event sponsored by a Swedish car manufacturer and sitting outside the American Bowl series entirely, and no NFL game has been played in Sweden before or since. It is the purest expression of what the preseason was for in that era: a league with more ambition than infrastructure, willing to fly two franchises to Scandinavia on the reasoning that the result did not matter, so the risk did not either. The Vikings won by a touchdown. Sweden has been waiting thirty-eight years for a rematch.
09
ExhibitionTokyo · London · Berlin · MontrealNFL INTERNATIONAL WEEK
Games47 DAYS
In a single week in August 1994 the NFL staged preseason games in Tokyo, London, Berlin and Montreal, drawing more than two hundred thousand spectators across three continents, and eleven days later it played the Azteca game that set the all-time attendance record. That summer was the high-water mark of the league's exhibition-led globalisation - an entire international strategy conducted with games that did not count, precisely because games that did not count could be moved anywhere without competitive complaint. Everything that followed, from the London series to Germany to the current schedule of regular-season fixtures abroad, was built on the audiences identified in those weeks. The preseason was the league's research department.
10
CancelledTom Benson Stadium · Canton, OhioPACKERS vs COLTS
FinalNONENOT PLAYED
The game that opens the season every year, in the town where the league was founded, called off shortly before an eight o'clock kickoff because the paint applied to the midfield logo and the end zones had congealed. Players described the affected areas as being like concrete and like cement; ground crews sprayed solvent for over an hour and rubber pellets came loose from the turf. Hall of Fame president David Baker consulted both head coaches and the league's chief operating officer, then cancelled - calling it a hard decision but an easy ethical one - and refunded every ticket, at a cost to the Hall of several million dollars. Fans were already in their seats; the class of 2016, inducted the previous night with Brett Favre at its head, was introduced to them instead. It was the second cancellation in the game's history, after the 2011 lockout, with the pandemic forcing a third in 2020. Andrew Luck said he assumed at first that it was a joke. It earns its ranking as the clearest statement anyone has made about what a preseason game is worth: faced with a small, avoidable risk of injury, everyone concluded there was nothing on the other side of the scale. Nobody has ever cancelled a game in January over paint.
11
CancelledEverywhere · 2020NO GAMES PLAYED
Games02020
The last entry is the one that never happened. The pandemic wiped out the entire 2020 preseason, and among the casualties was the Jets-Giants summer game, which had been played every August since that night at the Yale Bowl in 1969 - fifty-one consecutive years, the longest continuous preseason series in the league. Then something instructive happened: the regular season went ahead anyway, teams prepared without exhibitions, the football was recognisably football, and the argument that four preseason games were necessary quietly lost its last defenders. The schedule has since been cut to three, with the regular season lengthened to seventeen. The most important preseason of the modern era was the one that proved how little of it anyone actually needed.
The Full Card
All eleven, in order, with what each one is actually remembered for.
| Rank | Game | Date | Result | Why It Survived |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 49ers at Chargers | Sept 1, 2016 | - | Kaepernick kneels; Eric Reid joins him |
| 02 | Patriots at Raiders | Aug 12, 1978 | - | Stingley paralysed; the violence debate begins |
| 03 | Oilers vs Cowboys, Azteca | Aug 15, 1994 | 6-0 | 112,376 - the largest NFL crowd ever |
| 04 | Jets vs Giants, Yale Bowl | Aug 17, 1969 | 37-14 | Namath 3 TDs; Allie Sherman fired |
| 05 | Chiefs vs Bears | Aug 23, 1967 | 66-24 | Most points ever; first AFL-NFL meeting |
| 06 | Bears vs Cowboys, Wembley | Aug 3, 1986 | 17-6 | First American Bowl; built the London market |
| 07 | Steelers vs Patriots, Knoxville | Aug 14, 1982 | - | 93,251 - biggest US preseason crowd since 1966 |
| 08 | Vikings vs Bears, Gothenburg | Aug 14, 1988 | 28-21 | The only NFL game ever played in Sweden |
| 09 | NFL International Week | Aug 4-11, 1994 | - | Four games, three continents, 200,000 fans |
| 10 | Packers vs Colts, Canton | Aug 7, 2016 | Cancelled | Called off an hour before kickoff over paint |
| 11 | The 2020 preseason | 2020 | Not played | Proved the schedule could be cut; it was |
The Arithmetic
The biggest crowds in NFL history - and where they came from
The single most useful fact in this file. A meaningless exhibition in Mexico City drew a larger crowd than any Super Bowl, any regular-season game, and any championship in the sport's history.
The shrinking preseason
The cancelled summer of 2020 settled a decades-old argument. Teams prepared without exhibitions, the season went ahead, and the schedule was permanently trimmed with a seventeenth regular-season game taking its place.
The Record Book
The Crowds Nobody RemembersBefore the Super Bowl era, the biggest preseason draw in America was not an NFL game at all. The Chicago College All-Star Game pitted the reigning NFL champions against a team of graduating college players and routinely filled Soldier Field: 105,840 in 1947, 101,200 in 1948, 101,103 in 1942. Add a Redskins-Rams charity exhibition at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1950 that drew 95,625, and the record book for preseason attendance is dominated by games that have almost entirely fallen out of the sport's memory. When a modern exhibition draws ninety thousand and gets called historic, the historians reach for their files.
The Longest Summer SeriesThe Jets and Giants played each other in the preseason for fifty-one consecutive years, from that first meeting at the Yale Bowl in 1969 through 2019, the longest run of its kind in the NFL - the next-longest current streak, between the Chargers and 49ers, did not begin until nearly two decades later. The series was dead level when it resumed, 25-25-1, with the sole tie coming in 1972. For a fixture that decided nothing, it was remarkably well contested, and it produced its own oddities: Curtis Martin ran for 127 yards on seven carries with an 80-yard touchdown in 1999, and Bruce Harper accumulated 282 all-purpose yards in the 1978 edition.
Still the Best Thing on Television in JulyFor all the complaints, the appetite has not gone anywhere. The 2025 Hall of Fame Game between the Chargers and Lions - a 34-7 result contested almost entirely by players fighting for roster places - averaged 6.9 million viewers, the largest audience for the game since 2021, with 691,000 of those streaming, the biggest streaming figure ever recorded for an NFL preseason game. The football is admittedly poor. Several million people watch it anyway, every single August, because the alternative is no football at all.
Canton Was Not the FirstThe 2016 cancellation had a precedent almost nobody remembers. In 2001 a newly installed artificial surface at Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium was judged too dangerous, and the Eagles and Ravens never played their scheduled exhibition. Both teams walked out onto the field at eight o'clock anyway, at the moment the game should have kicked off, and saluted the crowd. Two preseason games, fifteen years apart, called off because the ground itself was unfit - and in both cases the decision was straightforward for the same reason. There was nothing to be won by playing.
The League's Own Test LaboratoryThe definitive account of all this comes from Mark Ford, an editor with the Professional Football Researchers Association, whose two volumes document every NFL and AFL preseason game played since 1960. His framing is the useful one: these were the league's test labs, where rule changes were trialled, broadcast innovations were attempted and careers were made or ended. His books also collect the oddities that only the exhibition schedule could produce - a 1972 game lost because the players wore the wrong shoes, and a defeat in 2000 sealed when a player tackled his own team-mate.
Sports-King's Note
Now for the fine printHow this list was built, and what it does and does not claim. The ranking is by consequence rather than quality of play, which is a judgement call and is offered as one; reasonable people would reorder it. Facts as recorded: Kaepernick sat during the anthem at San Francisco's first three 2016 preseason games, going unnoticed until the third, against Green Bay on August 26 at Levi's Stadium, after which he explained his reasons publicly; Nate Boyer, a former Green Beret and NFL long snapper, suggested kneeling on August 30; Kaepernick first knelt on September 1 at Qualcomm Stadium against the Chargers on the club's Salute to the Military night, with Eric Reid becoming the first team-mate to join him and Boyer standing alongside during the anthem. Darryl Stingley was injured on a hit by Jack Tatum in an exhibition at the Oakland Coliseum on August 12, 1978, while running a crossing pattern in the second quarter and lunging for a pass that fell incomplete; the impact fractured and dislocated his fourth and fifth vertebrae and left him a quadriplegic. He was twenty-six. He regained limited movement, used an electric wheelchair for the remainder of his life and died in 2007 at fifty-five; Tatum died in 2010. Stingley's remarks about officiating and excessive violence were made to the Chicago Tribune in 2004. The Azteca attendance of 112,376 for the Oilers-Cowboys game of August 15, 1994 is the NFL's own figure and stands as the largest crowd for any NFL game; Al Del Greco's two field goals accounted for all the scoring, and Emmitt Smith sat out. The Yale Bowl game of August 17, 1969 finished 37-14 before a crowd reported at over 70,000, with Namath throwing three touchdown passes; Allie Sherman's dismissal followed. The Chiefs' 66-24 win over the Bears at Municipal Stadium on August 23, 1967 is recorded as the most points scored by one team in an NFL preseason game, before 33,041, with 32 of those points coming in the second quarter; it remains the highest total in any Chiefs game. Halas's remarks about the mascot and the black eye are as reported. Note that one widely mirrored reference describes this as the Chiefs' first regular-season game against an NFL opponent, which is incorrect - it was a preseason exhibition, as the club's own history states. The first American Bowl was played at Wembley on August 3, 1986, Bears 17 Cowboys 6, with the series running to 2005 across forty games in eight countries. The Steelers-Patriots crowd of 93,251 at Neyland Stadium on August 14, 1982 and the pre-Super Bowl era College All-Star Game figures come from Professional Football Researchers Association records, compiled in response to claims that a 2016 exhibition had set a United States preseason attendance record; it had not. The Vikings-Bears game at Ullevi Stadium on August 14, 1988 remains the only NFL game played in Sweden. NFL International Week ran August 4 to 11, 1994 across Tokyo, London, Berlin and Montreal, drawing more than 200,000 spectators. The 2016 Hall of Fame Game between the Packers and Colts, scheduled for 8pm on August 7 at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium, was cancelled shortly beforehand because paint on the midfield logo and end zones had congealed; Hall president David Baker made the announcement after consulting both coaches and NFL chief operating officer Tod Leiweke, and all tickets were refunded at a cost to the Hall of several million dollars. It was the second cancellation in the game's history after the 2011 lockout, with a third following in 2020. A retrospective account attributing the 2016 cancellation to a storm system is not supported by contemporaneous reporting, which is unanimous that the cause was the paint. A comparable preseason cancellation occurred in 2001, when a new surface at Veterans Stadium was ruled unsafe for an Eagles-Ravens exhibition. The entire 2020 preseason was cancelled owing to the pandemic, ending the Jets-Giants streak at fifty-one summers, and the schedule was subsequently reduced to three games per team alongside a seventeen-game regular season. Where a figure is a reported crowd rather than an audited gate, it is described as reported. Several of these events predate reliable statistical record-keeping for exhibition games, and preseason statistics are not maintained to the standard of regular-season records anywhere in the sport.
One Last Word
Tonight's games will be played by men whose names most viewers will never learn, in front of half-full stadiums, for a result that will be forgotten by Saturday. That is precisely the condition under which everything on this list happened. Nothing was at stake, so a league flew to Sweden, a coach lost his job, a horse nearly collapsed from overwork, a hundred and twelve thousand people filled the Azteca, and a quarterback knelt down and changed the country's argument with itself. The preseason does not count. It just keeps mattering.
The hard numbers, for the road: the largest crowd ever to watch an NFL game was 112,376 at Estadio Azteca on August 15, 1994, for a preseason game the Oilers won 6-0 over the Cowboys on two Al Del Greco field goals, with reigning MVP Emmitt Smith sitting out. The most points scored by one team in a preseason game is 66, by the Chiefs against the Bears in August 1967, in the first AFL-NFL exhibition ever played. The Jets beat the Giants 37-14 at the Yale Bowl on August 17, 1969 in the teams' first meeting, Namath throwing three touchdowns, and Giants coach Allie Sherman was fired over it; the teams then met every summer for fifty-one years. Colin Kaepernick sat through the anthem before a preseason game against Green Bay on August 26, 2016 and first knelt before another against the Chargers on September 1. Darryl Stingley was paralysed in an exhibition at Oakland on August 12, 1978. The first American Bowl was played at Wembley in 1986 and the series reached forty games in eight countries. The largest American preseason crowd of the Super Bowl era was 93,251 at Knoxville in 1982. And in 2020 the NFL played no preseason at all, after which it cut the schedule to three games and added a seventeenth that counts.
