TODAY’S SPORTSTAT: Bears-Vikings’ halftime score was rare
By JERRY TAPP
Although the Minnesota Vikings-Chicago Bears Monday Night Football Game ended with a very typical 20-17 final score, the score at halftime was anything but typical.
With a safety and a field goal, the score at halftime was 3-2 in favor of the Vikings. It was only the eighth time in NFL history that there was a halftime score of 3-2.
The last time it happened was on October 12, 2008 when the Detroit Lions held a 3-2 lead over the Vikings.
The other games with a 3-2 halftime score were: 1947 (Rams-Packers), 1963 (Broncos-Raiders), 1967 (Bills-Broncos), 1974 (Chiefs-Dolphins), 1977 (Bucs-Vikings) and 1982 (Seahawks-Broncos).
It’s interesting to note that in all three 3-2 games at halftime that the Vikings played in, they won all three. In each of the three 3-2 at halftime games played by the Denver Broncos, they lost all three.
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.