The short version of this article is that there were no highlights from the NFL’s first week. Games not only scored very low, they weren’t close, either, and one word, terrible, about sums it up. This article gives a little more detail, however.
2016: The Highest Scoring, Most Competitive Football
The NFL’s last season gave fans some of the most competitive football, with some of the highest scores, in the league’s entire history, and it was capped off by a truly epic Super Bowl. The Super Bowl saw the New England Patriots rally back from a deficit of 25 points –and the first week of the season of 2017 makes these facts seem like they happened 100 years ago!
The Lowest Numbers for an Opening Week
Only three of the games which took place in the first week were decided by seven or fewer points, which is the lowest number in the NFL’s opening week since 1973 –that year, one game was decided by seven or fewer points. The first week hadn’t yielded less that even five such games since 1976, which was the year before Tom Brady was born.
In the 290 regular-season National Football League weeks since the year 2000, one in which three such contests occurred only ten times. And, were it not for the two late fourth-quarter touchdowns from the Los Angeles Chargers, the first week of 2018 would have joined the seventh week of 2009, the eighth of 2010, and the 12th of 2018 as the only weeks since 200 in which a measly two games were decided by seven points or less.
An Anomaly for the First Week
The results from the preceding five days are abnormal for the first week, which in recent years has become one of the NFL’s most competitive. It also marks a significantly stark turn from the season of 2016, when the opening week created four one-point games, two two-point games, and fashioned a margin of victory of 7.6 points, the lowest of any weeks since the first and second ones of 2013. The average amount of points that decided those first week’s games this was 13.6. For those keen on betting this beginning doesn’t bode well, and they may start looking at NRL premiership betting and other alternatives if the stats don’t improve.
There Weren’t Even High Scores to Enjoy
If the games are not going to be close, then one would hope, for entertainment’s sake that they would at least be high scoring. Week one, however, didn’t deliver there, either. The teams which took part in the first week’s games combined for an average 40.4 points per game –the sixth-lowest mark since 2012! That is more than five points below the average set in 2016.
Of course blowouts and low scores occur, but rarely do they do so in as pronounced a manner, or simultaneously, as they did this past week. For those who were keen on betting, the perks of online sportsbooks now seem all the more appealing, a they can get in at the last minute, should things improve. The ratio between the average total-points-per-game in the first week and the average margin-of-victory was 3 to 1, and this is the eighth lowest it has been in a single week since 2012. Low rations like this mean games aren’t scoring high either, which does not take for entertaining football games by any stretch of the imagination.
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