NFL History | Sports Authority Field at Mile High, Denver — The Longest Kicks Were Taken When a Miss Cost Nothing

On 8 December 2013 the Denver Broncos beat the Tennessee Titans 51-28 at Sports Authority Field at Mile High, in front of 76,554 people. The Pro Football Reference box score for that game lists three Matt Prater field goals. The second of them, at the end of the second quarter, was 64 yards, and it was the longest field goal made in a National Football League game up to that point.

Fox News, reporting that afternoon, placed the attempt at the Titans 46-yard line as the first half expired, and gave the temperature as 18 degrees at kickoff and 14 degrees when Prater kicked. It also set out the record he had broken: 63 yards, made four times, by Tom Dempsey in 1970, Jason Elam in 1998, Sebastian Janikowski in 2011 and David Akers in 2012.

Two of those four were kicked in Denver. The box score for 25 October 1998 prints the venue as Mile High Stadium and lists Elam's 63-yarder in the second quarter. The box score for 12 September 2011 prints Sports Authority Field at Mile High, the same building Prater kicked in, and lists Janikowski's 63-yarder at 0:00 of the second quarter, for the visiting Oakland Raiders.

That last detail is the one worth following. Akers made his 63-yarder at Lambeau Field on 9 September 2012 at 0:00 of the second quarter. Justin Tucker made 66 yards at Ford Field on 26 September 2021, taking the record from Prater, at 0:00 of the fourth. Cam Little made 68 yards at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas on 2 November 2025, which CBS Sports reported as the new league record, just before halftime. Prater's own kick came as a half expired. The box score line for Elam's gives the quarter but no clock. Of the kicks whose clock the box scores record, only Dempsey's, a fourth-quarter winner at Tulane Stadium on 8 November 1970, was taken with time still left to lose.

The rule that makes those two situations different was written to hold field goals down rather than to produce them. Reporting on the 1974 rules meeting, the Harvard Crimson wrote that the NFL had moved the goal posts ten yards back, from the goal line to the end line, and had ruled that after a missed field goal the ball must be returned to the line of scrimmage or to the 20-yard line, whichever is further out. The paper gave the league's stated purpose as ending the domination of the sport by kickers, and reported that in the previous season kickers had made a record 543 field goals at an average of five attempts a game. Under that rule a missed field goal gives the other side the ball at the line of scrimmage. When a period is ending there is no next possession for it to affect.

The two published accounts of the part Denver's air played in this kick do not agree. The CBS Sports report treated the mile-high atmosphere as a help. Fox News reported Prater saying that the freezing conditions took the altitude factor out. Both are left standing here. The record has since left Denver in any case: the two kicks that have beaten it were made at Ford Field in Detroit and at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.

Status note. As of September 2026 the stadium operator publishes the building's name as Empower Field at Mile High and its address as 1701 Bryant Street, Denver. The league record for a made field goal stands at Cam Little's 68 yards of 2 November 2025.

Coordinate. The pin is the federal address point for 1701 Bryant Street, the address the operator publishes, geocoded through the Census Bureau TIGER address file to 39.745912, -105.019033. That file interpolates along a street-number range rather than placing a building, and a second query on 1901 Bryant Street returned a point only about 60 metres away, which is too little movement across two hundred street numbers and marks the result as a point on the street rather than on the stadium. A second and separately maintained municipal record, Denver's tree inventory published through Colorado's open data portal, carries forty surveyed points on one large parcel addressed 1635 North Bryant Street in the Sun Valley neighbourhood, immediately north of West Colfax Avenue and about five hundred metres across from east to west. The centre of that parcel lies roughly 450 metres south-southwest of the address point. Neither record fixes the stadium footprint and the two do not agree, so the precision radius is set at 500 metres, which covers both. No building-placed route was found: the Socrata catalogue returns a 404 for data.denvergov.org, and a search of Colorado's portal for building energy benchmarking returned nothing.

Cover: personnel from Buckley Space Force Base walking off the field after unfurling a flag during the national anthem at a Denver Broncos game, 20 November 2022, photographed by Senior Airman Danielle Renzetti (VIRIN 221120-X-YW354-1372, DVIDS 7576980). It shows the building on an ordinary game day nine years after the kick this memory is about, not the kick itself.

Second image: the Broncos mascot greeting 4th Infantry Division and Fort Carson soldiers at the Broncos game against Philadelphia, 14 November 2021, photographed by Pfc. Joshua Zayas-Sabogal (VIRIN 211114-A-SF775-873, DVIDS 6940942). It is also not the 2013 game.