Sports Reference Blog

In June Pro Football Reference extended its game-by-game coverage of player fumbles, fumbles recoveries and fumble return yards back to 1989. Today we're happy to announce that we've added two more seasons of coverage (1988 and 1987) thanks to the research of Ken Pullis. In 1988 Randall Cunningham led the NFL with 12 fumbles. You can now see which games those came in in his game logs for that season. Similarly, you can see Dan Marino's league-leading eight fumble recoveries in his game logs. Fumble return yardage also shows up in the game logs back to 1987. Such as Reggie White's 70-yd return in 1987 against Washington. This information also appears in the box scores.

Additionally, these numbers are now searchable in Stathead. So you can see, for instance, that the most fumbles by a single player in a game in 1987 or 1988 is 5, done by a pair of replacement players,  Willie Totten and Dave Walter, during the 1987 players' strike. Furthermore, using the Span Finder, we can see that the nine fumbles that Totten had in his two 1987 games (the only two games of his career) are tied with Hall of Famer Kurt Warner for the most combined fumbles in any two-game span since 1987. However, Warner's consecutive games spanned two seasons, making Totten's the most in any two-game stretch within a single season, edging out the eight Dave Krieg had over two games in 1989.

We hope you enjoy this addition and please keep your eyes peeled for further extension of this coverage in the future.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2023 at 11:04 am and is filed under Announcement, Data, Pro-Football-Reference.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.