The Long View

First Blood

The team that scores first wins nearly two thirds of the time, the first team to twenty wins six times in seven, and almost half of all winners never trail at all. The comeback is the highlight reel, not the norm.

Football sells itself on the comeback, and the comeback is real enough to keep the ads honest. But the everyday truth of the sport runs the other way: games are won early far more often than they are stolen late. The sequence of a football game, reduced to its checkpoints:

First blood matters. The team that records the game's first score goes on to win 63.8 percent of the time, and that has cleared a coin flip in every season since 1999. What you score first matters beyond scoring it: open with a touchdown and the win rate is 68.5 percent; open with a field goal and it is 57.1. Part of that gap is simply offense quality revealed, the team that finishes its first drive in the end zone tends to be the better offense, but that is rather the point. The opening score is the game introducing itself.

The race to twenty

The most lopsided checkpoint on the table is the race to 20 points: the team that gets there first wins 86.4 percent of the time. Be careful what you do with that number. Twenty is a checkpoint that teams already winning reach first, not a magic threshold that unlocks victory. But as a live-viewing heuristic it is hard to beat: when the scoreboard reads 20-13, the game is far more decided than it feels.

Wire to wire, and the scarce lead change

Now the shape of the full game. In 44.1 percent of decided games, the eventual winner never trails at a single snap. Not once, from kickoff to the final score. And lead changes of any kind are scarcer than the montage suggests: 69.4 percent of games contain at most one, a clear majority in every season of the span. The back-and-forth classic exists, which is why you remember it. Most Sundays, one team takes the lead and keeps it.

Even the comeback strikes early: nearly four in five comeback winners take their first lead before the fourth quarter begins.

The comeback deserves its own accounting. Among the 2,502 winners who trailed before they ever led, 78.1 percent took their first lead before the fourth quarter. The celebrated fourth-quarter comeback is the minority path even inside the comeback population. Teams that win after falling behind mostly climb back in the second and third quarters, quietly, while the broadcast is still replaying the deficit.

Two pieces of folklore, checked

The opening coin toss decides nothing: teams receiving the opening kickoff won 48.9 percent of decided games, within a point of a coin flip. And the answer drive is momentum folklore: possessions immediately following an opponent's score actually produce a score at 31.4 percent, below the 34.5 percent rate of possessions overall, and the deficit showed up in every season since 1999. Some of that is drives starting late in halves, but the direction never flips: there is no answering surge wired into the sport.

How to use it: respect the early game. The first score, the first touchdown, the race to 20, these are the checkpoints where wins are actually distributed. The fourth quarter is where games end. It is only occasionally where they are decided.