The Most Common NFL Score: Average Final Game Scores and Frequency

A final score here means the pair of numbers at the end of a game, written with the winner first. A 23-20 result counts the same whether the home team or the visitors won it, because the question is how often that pair of totals shows up, not who scored it. Ties are kept, and a tied game such as 20-20 is written with the same number twice.

The top three results together account for 401 games, or 5.5 percent of everything played. That sounds small until it is set against the size of the field. The games produced 877 different final scores, so a single result at the top of the list still covers roughly one game in fifty-two. The long tail is the rest of the story: most final scores happened only a few times, and many happened once.

Anyone who wants the full list can download the table of all 877 results as a CSV file, which includes the count and share for every score.

The three most common NFL scores have something in common: the two teams finish exactly three points apart. A margin of three is a single field goal, and it is the most frequent margin in the league. About 15.1 percent of all games ended with a three-point gap, compared with 9.0 percent decided by exactly seven points, 6.0 percent by six and 4.2 percent by one.

The reason sits in the scoring rules. The NFL rulebook values a touchdown at 6 points, a field goal at 3 points and a safety at 2 points. After a touchdown, a try is worth 1 point when it is kicked, or when it is scored by a safety, and 2 points when it is a touchdown. In practice almost every touchdown is followed by a kicked extra point, so a touchdown is worth 7 points in most box scores, and a field goal is worth 3. Teams build their totals mostly out of those two building blocks.

That arithmetic explains the list of totals. Twenty points is two touchdowns and two field goals, 7 + 7 + 3 + 3. Seventeen is two touchdowns and one field goal, 7 + 7 + 3. Twenty-four is three touchdowns and a field goal, and twenty-seven is three touchdowns and two field goals. Each of the twelve most common single-team totals in the data can be written as some number of sevens plus some number of threes, as the table of team scores further down shows.

Put two teams together and the pattern repeats. If one team reaches 20 and the other reaches 17, the final score is 20-17. If the first team adds one more field goal, the result becomes 23-20 only when the other team also adds a field goal. The most common NFL score is therefore a product of two ordinary game scripts meeting in the middle, not of any special rule. Nothing about the number 23 is unusual on its own: 23 is a team total made of two touchdowns and three field goals, and it appears often because both numbers are easy to reach.

Overtime plays a smaller part. Of the 7,276 games, 443 went to overtime, which is 6.1 percent. Only 15 games ended in a tie, which is 0.2 percent of the total.

The average football score depends on which average is meant, so the page gives the usual ones. Across all 7,276 games, each team scored 22.13 points per game on average, and the median team score was 21. Add the two teams together and the average total for a game was 44.26 points, with a median of 44.

Looked at from the side of the winner and the loser, the average final score of a game was about 27.9 points for the winning team and 16.4 for the losing team. The medians are 27 and 16, so the typical final score of an NFL game is close to 27-16. That is different from the most common score, because a typical result is a middle value while the most common one is the single pair that occurs most often. The most common NFL score of 23-20 is a closer game than the typical one.

The average football score has also moved over time. Teams averaged 20.3 points per game in 2001, the lowest season in the data, and 24.7 points in 2020, the highest. Most seasons since 2012 sit between 21.8 and 23.4, with 2020 standing out well above the rest.

Seasons are not the same length in the table. The league played a 16-game schedule until 2020 and a 17-game schedule from 2021, and the first three seasons included only 31 teams. Because the table shows points per game, the length of the season does not distort the averages.

A different question is which single total a team reaches most often, regardless of what the opponent scored. Over 14,552 team performances, the most frequent total was 20 points, reached 1,017 times, followed by 17 points with 982 and 24 points with 940.

Every number in that table is a sum of sevens and threes. Ten is 7 + 3, thirteen is 7 + 3 + 3, fourteen is 7 + 7, and sixteen is 7 + 3 + 3 + 3. Thirty-one is four touchdowns and a field goal, and thirty-four adds a second field goal. About one team score in three, 32.5 percent, landed somewhere between 20 and 27 points.

The reverse is also visible. Two totals never happened at all in 27 seasons: 1 point and 4 points. Each needs an unusual sequence, such as a lone one-point safety on a try, two safeties, or a field goal plus a one-point safety, and none occurred in these seasons. A team scored exactly 2 points only three times, and exactly 5 points six times. Shutouts, where a team scores 0, are far more common: they happened in 187 games, which is 2.6 percent. A team scored exactly 3 points 322 times.

The most common football scores are close games, and the data shows how close. The median margin of victory was 8 points, and the average margin was 11.54 points, pulled upward by a small number of blowouts. About 23.5 percent of games were decided by three points or fewer, and 47.0 percent by seven points or fewer. In other words, nearly half of all NFL games were within one touchdown at the final whistle.

That closeness feeds the scores at the top of the table. A margin of three or seven describes one score, and games in that range are exactly where 23-20, 20-17, 27-24 and 24-17 come from. The very large margins sit far out in the tail. The biggest margin in the data was 59 points, when New England beat Tennessee 59-0 in week 6 of the 2009 season.

The final score also depends on where the game is played. Home teams averaged 23.30 points per game and visiting teams averaged 20.96, a gap of 2.3 points, and the medians show the same direction: 23 points at home and 20 on the road. Home teams won 4,097 of the 7,276 games, which is 56.3 percent, visitors won 3,164, which is 43.5 percent, and 15 games ended in a tie.

The most common final score differs a little depending on who won. When the home team won, 20-17 led with 83 games, followed by 27-24 with 75 and 23-20 with 69. When the visitors won, 23-20 led with 70 games, followed by 27-24 with 54 and 20-17 with 50. The same three scores appear in both lists, only in a different order, which is another sign that the three results are the natural landing spots for a close game and do not belong to one kind of team.

A final score can also be read as a single total, the sum of both teams. The most common combined totals were 37 points, reached in 280 games, 41 points in 277 games, 51 points in 275 games, 44 points in 270 games and 43 points in 255 games, each between 3.5 and 3.8 percent of the games. That is flatter than the list of team scores, because a total can be made in many ways: 27-24 and 31-20 both add up to 51. The average total of 44.26 points sits next to the total of 44, which was reached in 270 games, or 3.7 percent of the time.

Lopsided games are less rare than the top of the list suggests. A margin of 14 points or more happened in 35.4 percent of games, a margin of 21 or more in 17.7 percent, and a margin of 28 or more in 7.5 percent. At the other end, 14.0 percent of games produced 60 or more combined points, and 17.1 percent stayed at 30 or fewer. In 49.6 percent of games both teams scored 17 points or more, and in 36.6 percent both teams scored 20 or more, which is why a result such as 24-20 is so ordinary.

Of the 7,276 games, 6,967 were regular-season games and 309 were playoff games. The ranking is the same if only regular-season games are counted: 23-20 appears 132 times, 20-17 appears 124 times and 27-24 appears 123 times, followed by 24-17 with 88 games and 27-20 with 74.

The playoff sample is much smaller, so its order is less stable. Across the 309 playoff games, 20-17 happened nine times, 27-10 and 23-20 seven times each, and 34-31 and 27-24 six times each. With so few games, one more result would reorder the list, which is why the main table uses all games together.