NFL History Was Made During Vikings Win Over Falcons

The Week 9 matchup between the Minnesota Vikings and Atlanta Falcons had a lot of interesting twists, turns, and wrinkles.

Coming into the game, both teams would be starting a different quarterback than who had been starting through the earlier part of the season. The Vikings were forced to look to a new option after Kirk Cousins went down to a season-ending injury, while the Falcons opted to bench Desmond Ridder in favor of former Vikings backup Taylor Heinicke.

As the game began to unfold, the Vikings starter for the game, Jaren Hall, exited the game while leading a scoring drive as he suffered a concussion while running for the endzone. This forced the Vikings to look to the quarterback they had just traded for only a few days ago.

Hall would end up being one of a handful of Vikings players who would be forced to leave the game due to injury. Along with Hall, KJ Osborn would also suffer a scary concussion and Cam Akers left due to an ankle injury feared to be an Achilles injury.

Minnesota traded for Cardinals quarterback Josh Dobbs right before the trade deadline, planning on starting Jaren Hall at least this week before figuring out what to do for the rest of the season between Hall, Dobbs, and Nick Mullens, who could return from injury sometime soon.

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As Dobbs entered the game, his early gameplay was a little rocky. He ended up surrendering a safety early in the second quarter, which would set up an interesting piece of NFL history.

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That safety, combined with the three first half field goals scored by Atlanta, gave the Falcons a halftime score of 11 points - a pretty rare score for a team to achieve. Dobbs would again play a role in this piece of interesting NFL trivia/history by marching the Vikings down the field before halftime to score a touchdown, to bring the halftime score to 11-10.

That 11-10 halftime score is apparently a very rare NFL score. The FOX NFL team briefly flashed up a graphic during their broadcast declaring it is the only time in NFL history a halftime score has been 11-10.

Besides this being the first time this score has ever been logged at an NFL halftime, it has only been seen twice as a final score ever in the league's history.

Those two instances did happen in the modern NFL era.

The first was in a November 16, 2008 game where the Steelers beat the Chargers 11-10. The second was on September 25, 2022, when the Broncos beat the 49ers 11-10.

While the halftime score will go down in NFL history, the final score of the Vikings vs. Falcons game was far less historical. The final score 31-28 has been seen 89 times in NFL history.

LOOK: The story behind every NFL team name

Stacker delved into the story behind every NFL football team name. Overall team records, also included, are reflective of NFL regular-season games. There are some football teams with well-known nicknames—the Jets, for instance, are often referred to as Gang Green—but we also divulge how some teams’ official names are sparingly used (the Jets’ neighbors, the Giants, are actually known as the New York Football Giants). Sometimes a team name can tell you a lot about local history: The Vikings of Minnesota draw upon the area’s strong ties to Scandinavia, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are dripping in local legend related to Florida’s pirate past.

Let’s kick off the countdown with the folks who earned their nickname by buying boxes of used team jerseys.

Gallery Credit: Seth Berkman