Only the most obsessive football fans know the names of ex-Chicago Bears Bobby Douglass and Beattie Feathers. But Douglass, a quarterback from the 1970s, and Feathers, a running back from the 1930s, own two of the National Football League’s most impressive records — and both their names could be wiped from the record book this year by Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick.

Douglass set the record for most rushing yards in a season by a quarterback when he gained 968 yards in 1972. Feathers set the record for highest rushing average in a season when he gained 8.44 yards a carry in 1934. So far this season Vick has 60 carries for 496 yards, meaning he is on pace to eclipse Douglass’s total and is just a hairsbreadth behind Feathers’ average.

Vick, whose 5–2 Falcons visit the Detroit Lions Sunday, shivers when sports writers say he’s a valuable runner but a liability as a passer, so he certainly wouldn’t want to be compared to Douglass. The year he set the quarterback rushing record, Douglass completed just 75 of 198 passes. Although Vick has never been an accurate passer, he’s far ahead of Douglass’s 37.9% completion percentage, connecting on 55.4% of his passes this season.

Douglass compensated for his inaccuracy with the ability to throw long passes. Like Vick, Douglass had a rocket arm — although his passes often missed their targets, they went for long gains when they were complete. Douglass led the league in 1972 with 16.6 yards a completion, a far higher average than any quarterback in the modern NFL, where quarterbacks eschew long bombs for short, safe passes. But despite that ability to throw long, if Douglass were entering the NFL today, he wouldn’t play quarterback. The most similar player to Douglass in today’s NFL isn’t Vick, it’s Matt Jones of the Jacksonville Jaguars, whose great athleticism but inaccurate arm necessitated a switch from college quarterback to pro wide receiver.

Breaking Douglass’s record would be impressive, but topping Feathers’s 8.44 yards a carry would be even more so because Feathers’s record deserves an asterisk: it probably didn’t happen. Looking at the rest of Feathers’s career and considering the nascent state of football statistics at the time, the most reasonable conclusion one can draw is that Feathers’s record is bogus. He set it in just the third year the NFL kept official statistics, and a statistician’s error may have upped Feathers’s average. Most likely, the scorekeeper at Wrigley Field, where the Bears played, incorrectly included some of Feathers’ kickoff or punt return yards as rushing yards.

The NFL has already acknowledged one error in charting Feathers’s runs that season: For more than 50 years Feathers was credited with 1,004 yards on 101 carries, an average of 9.9 yards a carry, but in the 1980s NFL researchers found 18 extra carries, which bumped down his average. Curiously, those extra carries didn’t change his total yardage at all.

No one has ever come close to Feathers’s record in the 71 seasons since. That includes Feathers himself — he played seven years in the NFL and never again topped 350 yards in a season or 5.0 yards a carry. Even the greatest running backs in history — Jim Brown, O.J. Simpson, Barry Sanders, and others — never came within two yards a carry of Feathers’s record.

That Feathers and Douglass can own such seemingly important records and be relatively unknown says something about the way that in football — unlike baseball — numbers are not sacred. In fact, Feathers and Douglass might receive more attention than they ever have before if Vick breaks their record. He’s well on his way to getting them that recognition.