Most Consecutive Starts in NFL History

Brett Favre started 297 consecutive regular-season games in the NFL, from 1992 to 2010, the most in league history for any non-special-teams player. Add the playoffs and the streak stretches to 321 straight starts, a run of durability that no quarterback has come close to matching.

The number is staggering for the position it belongs to. Quarterbacks are the most protected and most targeted players on the field, and missing a single game, for injury, illness or a benching, ends the streak instantly. Favre never missed one for nearly two decades. Here is the record, the streaks chasing it, and why it is treated as one of football’s safest marks.

The longest consecutive-starts streaks

The table ranks the longest consecutive-starts streaks in NFL history. Favre’s figure is regular-season starts; his playoff-inclusive total is 321.

Player	Consecutive starts	Position	Years
Brett Favre	297	Quarterback	1992-2010
Jim Marshall	270	Defensive end	1961-1979
Philip Rivers	240	Quarterback	2006-2020
Peyton Manning	208	Quarterback	1998-2010

Three of the top four are quarterbacks, which reflects both the visibility of the position and the fact that a durable starting quarterback rarely gets rotated out the way other players do.

Brett Favre and a start every week for 18 years

Favre’s streak began with his first start for Green Bay in 1992 and did not end until a shoulder injury sidelined him against the New York Giants in December 2010. In between he started every game across three teams, playing through a broken thumb, a badly sprained ankle, a separated shoulder and the deaths of family members. He treated starting as non-negotiable, and his teams built around the certainty that he would be under center.

That is the part of the record that resists imitation. It is not only talent; it is 18 seasons without a single week off at a position that gets hit on nearly every dropback. The streak is really a measure of availability, and availability at that scale is almost unheard of.

Jim Marshall: the iron man before Favre

Before Favre, the consecutive-starts record belonged to Jim Marshall, who started 270 straight games as a defensive end for the Minnesota Vikings between 1961 and 1979. His streak may be the more physically punishing of the two, because a defensive lineman collides with blockers on every snap and has no rules shielding him from contact. Favre broke Marshall’s record, but he did it at a position with more protection, which is why many still rank Marshall’s run alongside it rather than below it.

Why the record is essentially untouchable at quarterback

Modern rules make the streak both easier and harder to build. Quarterbacks are better protected from certain hits, but concussion protocols now sideline players who would once have stayed in, and load management around injuries is far more cautious. A single missed game for any reason resets the count to zero, and over a career that means avoiding every injury, every illness and every coaching decision to rest a starter.

The consecutive-games record for players overall is complicated by special-teams roles, since some kickers and punters have appeared in more straight games than Favre started, in positions that rarely involve being tackled. But for position players who start, 297 is the mark, and no active quarterback is within range of it.

Where the record sits among sport’s durability feats

Favre’s streak invites comparison with the great iron-man runs across sport, and it holds up. For baseball’s version of the same feat, see the most consecutive games played in MLB, where Cal Ripken Jr.’s streak is the benchmark. And for the quarterbacks who turned that availability into hardware, our list of the most Super Bowl wins by a quarterback tracks the position’s biggest winners. Want to test how well you know the players behind these records? Try our Guess the NFL Player game. Favre’s 297 is the iron-man standard, and the modern game is built in a way that keeps it out of reach.