Every NFL Team’s 2019 Record In 1-Score Games
Dougal Brownlie/Getty Images. Pictured: Russell Wilson
Records in one-score games is one of nine metrics our Director of Predictive Analytics, Sean Koerner, weighs in his NFL Luck Ratings.
The Seattle Seahawks are NFL Twitter’s favorite example of a “lucky” team in this regard. They went 9-2 in games decided by seven or fewer points in 2019 en route to an 11-5 season. So hypothetically if the Seahawks would have been on the other end of “luck” in those one-score games, flipping their record to 2-9, their overall record would have been 4-12.
That’s a seven-win swing.
The inverse example would be the Los Angeles Chargers, who did actually go 2-9 in one-score games last season. By applying the same hypothetical exercise, had the Chargers instead gone 9-2 in one-score games, it would have flipped their overall record from 5-11 to 12-4.
Of course, luck impacts these records. So this doesn’t mean that the Seahawks were only a four-win team of the Chargers were actually a 12-win team.
Generally, we should expect teams to regress toward a .500 record in one-score games the next season — whether they had “good” or “bad” luck the season prior.
All that said, here’s how every team fared in games decided by seven or fewer points in 2019.