TODAY’S SPORTSTAT: 30 is magic number for NFL playoff teams
By JERRY TAPP
The Jacksonville Jaguars have advanced to the AFC Championship Game with two very different wins: A 10-3 win over the Buffalo Bills in their Wild Card contest; and a 45-42 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers in their Divisional Round game.
In looking at the playoff games played in the NFL since the start of the Super Bowl era (since 1966), teams have a 90% chance of winning a post-season game if they can score 30 or more points. Playoff teams are 208-24 (a .897 winning percentage) when they scored 30 or points in a playoff games since 1966.
Here’s a look at the combined records of playoff teams from 1966 through the first two rounds of the playoffs this season based on how many points they scored.
0-9 points 3-113 .026
10-19 points 68-231 .227
20-29 points 217-128 .629
30-39 points 149-21 .876
40 or more points 59-3 .952
Note: Teams that score under 20 points in a playoff game since 1966 are 71-344 (.171 winning percentage).
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.