Tapp-ing into the Numbers: 40 Packers Stats Until Opening Kickoff (No. 8)
By JERRY TAPP
Does winning the opening coin toss make a difference in determining which team wins an NFL game?
Based on research from pro football reference.com over the past 10 NFL seasons, it appears there is only a slight edge for the teams that win the toss.
Teams that won the coin toss from 2007-16 were 1316-1238-6 (a .515 winning percentage).
The Tennessee Titans won the most coin tosses in regular season games in the past 10 seasons. Of a potential 160 games, the Titans won 95 coin tosses, most in the NFL. They were followed by the Buffalo Bills with 94 and the Green Bay Packers with 89.
At the other end of the list were the Minnesota Vikings who won only 63 of a possible 160 coin tosses from 2007-16, fewest in the league.
Five different teams won 60% or more of their games in the past 10 seasons when they won the coin toss: New England (.808), Pittsburgh (.675), Green Bay (.657), Dallas (.633) and New Orleans (.625).
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.