*Scoring by Quarter

[Beaver]

Seems the 1st quarter is where games are won are lost, interestingly.

Not much to say here, really. I expected the best teams to shine in the 4th quarter but that doesn't seem to be the case. In the case of New Orleans, at least, it wasn't really loading up on points in garbage time either, since a full 15 of our 4th quarter points (~20%) came Week 1 against Arizona when we came back to force overtime and what garbage time points we did have were typically undone by garbage time points allowed.

I think San Jose is really interesting since they've been one of the best 1st quarter teams and then have a negative point differential in the 2nd through 4th quarters. A lot of this is definitely impacted by taking a small sample size (9 games) and splitting it into even smaller sample sizes (36 quarters) with arbitrary cut-off points so I don't think this is too meaningful. For example, Philadelphia has had 44 points scored in the final 3 minutes of the 1st or 3rd quarters and allowed 14 - if just 1 or 2 of those touchdowns were delayed into the second or fourth quarters their spread looks totally different.

Breaking it down by halves instead of quarters (with OT included in the 2nd half) makes it a bit less noisy:

[JuOSu]

Love good analysis like this