A historic day at Lambeau Field
Posted by Jason Lisk on Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Something historic happened Sunday at Lambeau Field—something that had never happened, but which appeared like it could be a possibility as of last November, and which we had to wait all offseason and eight weeks into this season to finally witness. That’s right, it was the first ever 38-26 game in the history of the National Football League. Bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you? Well, reader David Herson did.
Remember last year, when the Steelers and Chargers played a game that finished 11-10, and everyone was a-buzz with talk about the first ever 11-10 game in NFL history? Well, Sean Forman whipped up a game score finder so that we could find every game for each score combination. (click here to play around with it). David took that information and calculated that 38-26 was the score combination most due to occur out of those that had never happened. You can see his full list of most likely score combinations in the comments to that earlier post.
Next on his list: 42-16. You’ve been warned.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 6:44 AM and filed under History. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Skip to the end and leave a response. Trackbacks are closed.
It is amazing as old as the NFL is and how many games there are a year that it had never happened.
Posted on 03-Nov-09 at 8:13 am | Permalink"an historic"? Is that an accent?
Posted on 03-Nov-09 at 11:48 am | PermalinkI changed it Mattie. But see, I'm sophisticated.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/anhistoric.html
I wrote that quickly without thinking, and then got to thinking, is it a or an. Then thought, I'm spending too much time thinking.
Posted on 03-Nov-09 at 11:58 am | PermalinkI don't think it's really that amazing. I think it's the Feynman's license plate story at work.
Just with scores up to 50, there are probably something like 1,300 different possible scores. I don't know how many football games there've been, probably less than 10,000. So if you were looking at it from 1939 or something and said "I bet no game ends up 38-26 for the next 50 years", that'd be kind of amazing. But looking at it after the fact, it was almost inevitable that we'd end up with scores that had never happened before.
Posted on 03-Nov-09 at 12:02 pm | PermalinkReminds me of that Falcons game about a decade ago when Fox used a British play-by-play guy. I still can't help think of Chris Chandler as "Chris Chawndler."
Posted on 03-Nov-09 at 12:03 pm | PermalinkHahaha, I know some people don't pronounce the H in historic, so it'd make sense for them to say "an historic".
It made me think of Eddie Izzard's bit on language
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IzDbNFDdP4
Particularly the part about herbs.
Posted on 03-Nov-09 at 12:09 pm | PermalinkThe fact that it never happened is surprising because the score isn't overly odd. a 4-2 score would be remarkable since that would mean 3 safeties (which are rare in the first place)and nothing else. But 38 and 26 are not so rare.
38- 5 TDs and 1 FG
26- 3 TDs, 2 FG, with one missed XP.
not as common as a 20-17 game, but it seems likely enough to have happened already.
Nevertheless, it's always cool when something happens that has never happened in almost 90 years of the NFL.
Posted on 03-Nov-09 at 7:40 pm | PermalinkHey, congrats on the mention in USA Today's sports section today!
Posted on 04-Nov-09 at 11:49 am | PermalinkWhen Sean's post first appeared last year I picked 17-2 as the next never-to-be-achieved score to be achieved. I was close to it a few weeks ago, though--I don't recall the game, but there was a game that was 17-2 in the fourth quarter.
Posted on 04-Nov-09 at 4:31 pm | PermalinkDaniel, it was the Redskins/Panthers game. I was also hoping it would stay 17-2 for the sake of novelty, but no such luck.
Posted on 04-Nov-09 at 9:56 pm | PermalinkWhat I meant was there's a LOT of scores that aren't overly odd, so with a limited number of games, some "not overly odd" scores won't happen for a while, and some bizarre scores will happen immediately. So looking back, you can say "wow that's weird" but in reality, it's almost inevitable.
For example...
The Saints beat the Giants 48-27. That seems like a pretty not-odd score. And indeed, it happened in 2007. The Bears beat the Lions 48-24, just a field goal less than the other -- not odd at all. First time it's happened since 1952.
This last week, the Bears beat the Browns 30-6 and the Ravens beat the Broncos 30-7. One of those scores happened last year, the other hasn't happened since 1992.
Posted on 04-Nov-09 at 10:08 pm | Permalink