I posted the blurb the other day where I mentioned that I expected the scoring would be a little down in Week 17. All of the games today are divisional games, and they tend to be lower scoring. Over the last five years, this has tended to be the lowest-scoring weekend of the year.
But a couple of readers mentioned that they didn’t necessarily agreed. Couldn’t the low scores in Week 17 be tied not to divisional matchups but to more teams finishing the year with lesser, incompetent-type quarterbacks? And maybe the weather is a factor.
Reasonable enough concerns, I have gone back and looked at additional data.
It was 2010 that the league went to finishing each season with 16 divisional games. But what about the previous years? How was the scoring in 2007, 2008 and 2009?
So I have run those numbers.
Ends up that there does appear to be a divisional component.
Here’s the data for all of the Week 17 slates since 2003. Total points scored in those 16 games, and how it ranked relative to the other 16 weeks. Actually 15 weeks. I patched together the various weeks so that there’s 16 games in each week. That is, Weeks 4-11 in each year have some games from neighboring weeks in there so that there are 16 blocks in each time frame. It’s only Weeks 1-3 and Weeks 12-17, I think, where all teams were in action each team.
| SCORING IN WEEK 17 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Year | Points | Rank |
| 2003 | 600 | 15 |
| 2004 | 677 | 9 |
| 2005 | 703 | 3T |
| 2006 | 735 | 3 |
| 2007 | 788 | 1 |
| 2008 | 716 | 7 |
| 2009 | 676 | 10 |
| 2010 | 604 | 15 |
| 2011 | 759 | 1T |
| 2012 | 737 | 8 |
| 2013 | 663 | 16 |
| 2014 | 661 | 14 |
The league shift the schedule in 2010. Since that time, Week 17 has ranked 15th, 1st (tie), 8th, 16th and 14th. There is the one really good year in there (2011) but overall that works out to last over the 2010-14 time period.
In the previous seven years, however, note that scoring tends to be above-average – 15th, 9th, 3rd (tie), 3rd, 1st, 7th and 10th.
Flipping the thing around, there isn’t a week that dominates for offenses. Below is the rundown of the 24 best weeks from the last 12 years (taking two per year). Only two weeks show up three times – Week 4 (which actually includes a few Week 5 games) and Week 14 (which is actually Week 15, considering every team has its bye before then).
Only observation of note here is that Weeks 2 and 3 don’t show up at all, and Week 1 is mentioned only once. Seems like offenses take a while to get going.
| HIGHEST SCORING WEEKS | ||
|---|---|---|
| Year | Week | Points |
| 2003 | 5 | 766 |
| 2003 | 9 | 734 |
| 2004 | 12 | 787 |
| 2004 | 14 | 748 |
| 2005 | 6 | 790 |
| 2005 | 10 | 708 |
| 2006 | 6 | 766 |
| 2006 | 7 | 745 |
| 2007 | 16 | 788 |
| 2007 | 12 | 752 |
| 2008 | 11 | 837 |
| 2008 | 4 | 764 |
| 2009 | 4 | 764 |
| 2009 | 6 | 735 |
| 2010 | 9 | 858 |
| 2010 | 14 | 779 |
| 2011 | 16 | 759 |
| 2011 | 4 | 759 |
| 2012 | 1 | 791 |
| 2012 | 10 | 766 |
| 2013 | 13 | 859 |
| 2013 | 14 | 844 |
| 2014 | 4 | 839 |
| 2014 | 8 | 802 |
Finally, another reader smartly wondered if scoring tended to be lower in the second of the divisional games – since defenses had a chance to make adjustments from the earlier meeting. Sounds reasonable enough.
But not greatly supported by the evidence.
Since 2004, there hasn’t been a huge decline in scoring in the second meetings between teams. Scores were down by 2.7 points per game (per team) in these games last year, but scores were lower in only six of the previous 10 seasons. Overall, the difference has been only a tenth of a point.
| SCORING IN DIVISIONAL GAMES | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Year | 1st | 2nd | Diff |
| 2004 | 21.07 | 22.24 | 1.17 |
| 2005 | 19.76 | 22.01 | 2.25 |
| 2006 | 19.54 | 18.97 | -0.57 |
| 2007 | 22.61 | 21.42 | -1.20 |
| 2008 | 22.42 | 21.32 | -1.09 |
| 2009 | 21.11 | 20.97 | -0.15 |
| 2010 | 21.78 | 20.25 | -1.53 |
| 2011 | 20.73 | 22.74 | 2.01 |
| 2012 | 21.72 | 22.97 | 1.25 |
| 2013 | 22.33 | 21.38 | -0.96 |
| 2014 | 23.22 | 20.54 | -2.68 |
| Avg | 21.48 | 21.35 | -0.14 |
Since 2004, there have been 528 of these rematch games (like the 16 we’ll see today).
Of those, scoring was higher in 262 games. It was lower in 252 games – so almost the same. (In 14 of the games, the total number of points was exactly the same).