What’s the highest-scoring NFL game of all time?

What’s the highest-scoring NFL game of all time? It’s a perfectly reasonable and fun question to ask after the Chicago Bears and the Cincinnati Bengals served up a war for the ages this past Sunday.

In that game, a 47-42 classic that left fans breathless and stat nerds smiling, the two teams combined for a whopping 89 points.

It felt like one of those old-school shootouts where defenses politely excused themselves and the quarterbacks got on with the business of piling up points.

But 89 points, as entertaining as it was, doesn’t come close to the summit. Here, I share some of the scorelines that make even that Bears-Bengals tilt look almost tame in comparison.

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The highest-scoring game in NFL history remains the Washington–New York Giants affair from November 27, 1966, a 72-41 slugfest that produced a staggering 113 combined points – a figure that still sits atop the record books.

That afternoon at DC Stadium saw an almost farcical level of scoring: 16 touchdowns and even a late Charlie Gogolak field goal that nudged the total past 110. It’s the gold standard for “how on earth did that happen?” games.

Behind that 113-point outlier, there are a handful of modern affairs that get mentioned whenever someone says, “Remember that game?”

The Bengals’ 58-48 win over the Cleveland Browns in 2004 produced 106 combined points and ranks second on the all-time list – a proper shootout in which neither team seemed interested in doing anything other than scoring. That classic still lives large in AFC lore.

Not far behind that is the 54-51 Los Angeles Rams win over the Kansas City Chiefs in 2018 – 105 points of end-to-end fireworks in primetime that read like a highlight reel of offensive scheming and defensive mistakes.

Games like that show that while the 1966 mark is a historical outlier, the modern NFL’s rules and offensive creativity have made triple-digit combined scores less mythical than they once were.

So, how does Sunday’s Bears–Bengals compare?

A combined total of 89 points is right there on the border of the era’s most breathless affairs, but well short of the 100-point club and miles from the 113 peak.

It’s the kind of game that banishes any talk of conservative play-calling for a week – a dramatic, clutch-finish spectacle (complete with lead changes in the final minute) rather than a permanent rewrite of record books.

Records are stubborn things, but they don’t make excitement any less meaningful. The Bears and Bengals gave us a classic: a modern shootout that reminded us why we watch. It won’t topple the 1966 behemoth, but then again, few things do.

What it will do is sit on highlight reels, water-cooler conversations, and in the memories of anyone who watched a rookie tight end and a veteran quarterback trade blows with the scoreboard until one side could no longer keep up.