Five years ago, Doug wrote an interesting post about game-winning touchdowns. Let’s be clear: tracking things like game-winning touchdowns is only interesting in a trivial sort way, but hey, it’s April.

Football doesn’t have a statistic like “game-winning RBIs” the way baseball does, although my friend Scott Kacsmar has been doing a great job tracking 4th quarter comebacks and game-winning drives for quarterbacks. I was wondering which players have scored the most game-winning touchdowns in the 4th quarter or overtime, and fortunately I have the data to answer that pretty easily. I looked at all games, regular and postseason, in all leagues, from 1940 to 2012, and counted all touchdowns scored that put the player’s team ahead for good (with one exception: I did not count touchdowns scored when down by 7 and the team successfully went for two afterwards).

The table below lists all players with at least five such touchdowns and the teams for which they scored those touchdowns.

We can add this to an already impressive list of career accomplishments for Marcus Allen. You can see all of the boxscores for the games where he scored game-winning touchdowns below:

11/28/1996: kan 28, det 24
09/22/1996: kan 17, den 14
10/17/1993: kan 17, sdg 14
12/10/1989: rai 16, crd 14
11/20/1986: rai 37, sdg 31
11/17/1985: rai 13, cin 6
09/24/1984: rai 33, sdg 30
10/07/1984: rai 28, sea 14
10/09/1983: rai 21, kan 20
12/18/1982: rai 37, ram 31

Finally, here is a list of all players with at least three 4th quarter, game-winning rushing touchdowns:

And all players with at least three 4th quarter, game-winning receiving touchdowns:

Reggie Wayne comes up surprisingly high on the list; on the other hand, Marvin Harrison is conspicuously absent. He had just one fourth-quarter game-winning touchdown in his career way back in 1999.