Week 17 will feature plenty of meaningless game. On the AFC side, for example, 10 of the 16 teams have been eliminated from playoff consideration. Many of these teams will hold out players or perhaps make winning less of a priority. But that tend to make those games lower or higher scoring?
Bengals-Ravens, Cardinals-Rams, Jets-Bills and Bucs-Panthers jump out as these kind of games. None of these teams have anything to officially play for. Should that make those games higher scoring (with softer defenses)? Or are the offenses more likely to sleepily bog down?
I pulled out the numbers for the last 10 years. This is 32 teams playing 16 games a year, so 5,120 offenses going into games. In Week 17 every year, there are a number of teams with nothing to play for. So you would figure that if those games were notably better or worse, it would tend to show up.
To standardize the number of games in each slot, I’m not looking at Weeks (1 thru 17) but at Games (1 thru 16). So for some teams, Game 8 will be in NFL Week 8; for others it would be in Week 9.
For Week 17, however, that’s the 16th game for every team. Similarly, teams never have byes in Week 16, so each team plays its 15th game in Week 16.
And the numbers show that those are two of the four lowest-scoring weeks.
There are only five weeks where the average score tends to be under 22 points, and all but one of those weeks can be explained.
That group includes Weeks 1-2. At that time, offenses are behind defenses – it takes them more time to get their timing and chemistry down.
And two of the other low-scoring games occur in Week 16-17 (shown as Games 15-16). I can’t say for certainty that it’s all due to teams mailing it in. Weather could be a factor. But those games also tend to be a little lower scoring.
| AVERAGE SCORES (2006-2015) | |
|---|---|
| Points | Game |
| 22.82 | Game 4 |
| 22.81 | Game 6 |
| 22.60 | Game 8 |
| 22.57 | Game 11 |
| 22.43 | Game 3 |
| 22.32 | Game 9 |
| 22.31 | Game 7 |
| 22.18 | Game 13 |
| 22.12 | Game 14 |
| 22.10 | Game 12 |
| 22.10 | Game 5 |
| 21.95 | Game 2 |
| 21.94 | Game 16 |
| 21.75 | Game 15 |
| 21.39 | Game 10 |
| 21.14 | Game 1 |
—Ian Allan