Tapp-ing into the Numbers 40 Packers Stats Until Opening Kickoff (No. 4)
The Green Bay Packers lost their 2014 season opener to the Seattle Seahawks, 36-16. That 20-point season-opener loss was the sixth time in the Super Bowl era (since 1966) that the Packers lost their first game of the year by 20 points or more.
The last time prior to the ’14 defeat was in 2006 when they lost their season opener to the Bears 26-0. Following are the worst season-opener game losses for the Packers since 1966:
40 points: Lost 40-0 to the Detroit Lions in 1970
28 points: Lost 31-3 to the Houston Oilers in 1986
27 points: Lost 34-7 to the Los Angeles Rams in 1988
26 points: Lost 26-0 to the Chicago Bears in 2006
20 points: Lost 20-0 to the Los Angeles Raiders in 1987
20 points: Lost 36-16 to the Seattle Seahawks in 2014
An interesting note: In the previous seasons where the Pack lost their season opener by 20 or more points, Green Bay did not make the playoffs in any of those seasons. In fact, the best year of those five seasons was in 2006 when they ended the year 8-8. In 2014, the Packers not only made the playoffs after their season-opening 20-point loss, but they won the NFC North and made the playoffs.
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.