NFL’s parity is quite evident
By JERRY TAPP
Just three weeks into the 2017 NFL season and 30 of the 32 NFL teams have already tasted defeat. The only remaining undefeated teams are the Atlanta Falcons and the Kansas City Chiefs, who are sitting at 3-0 in the standings.
Since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970, this is only the fifth season where two or fewer teams were still undefeated after the third week of games. In addition to this season, in 1985 (Chicago Bears and L.A. Rams) and 1983 (Dallas Cowboys and L.A. Raiders) there were only two undefeated teams left after Week 3.
There were, however, two seasons, 1971 and 1972, when there was only one team undefeated after Week 3. In 1971 it was the Washington Redskins; in 1972 it was the Miami Dolphins.
Since 2000, the average number of undefeated teams after Week #3 is just under five per season.
Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.