SPORTS STAT: Starting fast pays off for NFL teams
By JERRY TAPP
If you watched Thursday Night Football (Kansas City vs. the Raiders) a couple days ago, you saw the Raiders score a pair of TDs in the first quarter.
Scoring 14 or more points in the first quarter is not a common occurrence in an NFL game, but it has happened enough to show us that the team that does put 14 or more points on the scoreboard is usually in for a good game.
The Raiders went on to win the game 31-30 on a last-second TD. Since the 2010 season, NFL teams are now 229-48-1 (.826 winning percentage) in regular season games when they score 14 or more points in the first quarter.
The Green Bay Packers have had the most games with 14 or more points in the first quarter since 2010 with 20. The Patriots are second with 16 games. What makes this Packers stat all the more impressive is that they are 20-0 in those games. In fact, the Packers have not lost a game when they scored 14 or more points in the first quarter since November 8, 2009, a streak of 22 straight wins.
The Packers are one of seven NFL teams that are undefeated since 2010 when they tally 14 or more points in the first quarter. The others: Cincinnati (8-0), Carolina (7-0), Seattle (7-0), Minnesota (6-0), Arizona (5-0) and Miami (3-0).
Thirty-one of the 32 NFL teams have a .500 or better winning percentage in these games; the only team with a losing record in games when they score 14 or more points in the first quarter is Jacksonville. They are 0-3 (.000).
Photo by Ronald Woelfel
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.