IStock Photo 4068446 © Lori Sparkia

There may be no more satisfying moment in sports than coming up big when it matters most. In Super Bowl XXXIV, which was played in Atlanta, GA, on January 30, 2000, St. Louis Rams’ quarterback Kurt Warner did just that. He passed for 414 yards and led the Rams to a 23-16 win against the Tennessee Titans. The highlight of his performance came with under two minutes to go in the fourth quarter when he lofted a 73-yard tie-breaking touchdown pass to Isaac Bruce.

On that magical night in the Georgia Dome, Warner set a Super Bowl passing record and was named the game’s MVP. Up to that point, he had toiled through a frustrating career that saw him banished to such football-playing outposts as NFL Europe and the Arena Football League—not to mention a stint as a supermarket bagger back home in Iowa. So, not only had Warner become the only quarterback to pass for 400 or more yards in a Super Bowl, but he’d had a career-defining “big game”—one in which he realized his full potential and passed an established milestone—defying considerable odds to do so.

Consider that passing for 400 yards in any NFL game is no small feat. Quarterbacks have done it only 214 times. In fact, the odds an NFL quarterback will pass for at least 400 yards in any game are 1 in 97.37. On October 18, 2009, New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady barely missed the mark—throwing for 380 yards in a 59-0 rout—also against the Tennessee Titans. Statistically, Brady’s accomplishment is not uncommon. The odds that a quarterback will pass for at least 300 yards in any game are 1 in 8.16. But Brady’s big game was perhaps too big—he had thrown for 345 yards at the end of the first half alone, and was taken out of the game altogether only 5 minutes into the second half. Brady had to settle for another big-game record on that day: 5 touchdown passes in a single quarter.

As one would imagine, the toughest threshold for quarterbacks is passing for 500 yards. Those odds are 1 in 2,110. In 2006, the New Orleans Saints’ Drew Brees bucked those odds and reached the milestone by throwing for 510 yards in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals, marking only the ninth time a quarterback had managed the feat. Despite Brees’s “big game,” the Saints lost the matchup 31-16. If he’d been winning, though, he, like Tom Brady, might have been taken out of the game.