While promoting this film, Jim Brown told critic Roger Ebert "What I want to do is play roles as a black man, instead of playing black man's roles. You know? The guy in 'The Split,' for example, could be any color. And I don't make a big thing out of my race. If you try to preach, people give you a little sympathy and then they want to get out of the way. So you don't preach, you tell the story. I have a theory, an audience doesn't need to get wrapped up in blackness every time they see a Negro actor. And a movie doesn't have to be about race just because there's a Negro in it. If there's a bigot in the audience, he has to keep reminding himself, that's a black man, that's a Negro, because the story line has left him 'way behind, man. Away behind. Just tell the story, and before you know it, that cat will be identifying with you, and he won't even know how it happened."
This was Donald Sutherland's first movie filmed in America. He was shooting in London when the offer came through, but he didn't have enough money to fly his family to Los Angeles. Fellow Canadian Christopher Plummer lent him $1,500.
Jim Brown's first lead starring role.
The game footage early in the movie is of an actual Rams-Falcons game, played on December 3, 1967 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Rams did win the game by 20-3, but it was a normal regular season game, not a "playoff". The following game on the day of the heist was the "playoff" game - with its anticipated higher attendance and higher gate receipts to steal.
Based on the 1966 novel "The Seventh" by Richard Stark (a pseudonym for Donald Westlake). In the novel, Jim Brown's character "McClain" is actually called "Parker," the high-stakes criminal who features in several Stark novels. He is also portrayed by Lee Marvin (in "Point Blank"), Robert Duvall (in "The Outfit"), Mel Gibson (in "Payback") and Jason Statham (in "Parker") - and only in the last of these does the character have the name Stark gave him.