On this day: Joe Montana and Jerry Rice rewrote the record book in Atlanta

On this day in 1990, Joe Montana and Jerry Rice rewrote the record book in Atlanta. The San Francisco 49ers beat the Falcons 45-35, and the night still sits near the top of every franchise and league single-game ledger for passing and receiving.

Montana’s career day

Montana completed 32 of 49 passes for 476 yards and six touchdowns with two interceptions. Both the yardage and the six scoring throws were career highs and 49ers single-game records. Five of the touchdowns went to Rice; the sixth was a 43-yard strike to Mike Sherrard that kept Atlanta from ever climbing all the way back.

It was not a clean start. Montana missed on his first few attempts, then settled into a rhythm that produced four touchdown passes by halftime. By the final whistle he had posted a 119.6 passer rating on a day when Atlanta’s Chris Miller also threw for 389 yards and four scores — and still left with a loss in a shootout at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

Rice’s five-touchdown night

Rice caught 13 passes for 225 yards and five touchdowns, tying the NFL single-game record for receiving scores. The touchdowns covered 24, 25, 19, 13 and 15 yards. The 13 catches were a club record at the time, and the five scores also set a 49ers mark that still defines the franchise’s receiving history.

Anniversary posts and club retrospectives still frame October 14, 1990 as the signature Montana-to-Rice regular-season explosion: five connections for touchdowns in one afternoon, plus the Sherrard scoring throw that made it six for Montana. Rice’s 30 points snapped a decades-old club single-game scoring mark and put the Falcons’ secondary on the wrong side of a Hall of Fame tape that still gets recirculated every mid-October.

Also on this date

October 14 carries another league milestone five years earlier. On Monday Night Football in 1985, the New York Jets retired Joe Namath’s No. 12 during a home win over the Miami Dolphins — Broadway Joe’s number coming down while Montana and Rice were still building the San Francisco dynasty that would peak with nights like Atlanta.

Thirty-six years on, the Atlanta box score remains the cleaner headline: 476 and six for Montana, 13-225-5 for Rice, and a 45-35 road win that still reads like fiction when you open the league’s single-game lists. That is why the anniversary clip still travels — and why WhyNFL marks the date every year.