Three NFL Teams Won This Week While Their Offense Was Actively Bad — And Other Lies The Scoreboard Told You In Week 2
The box score lied to you about at least four teams this week. Here's the receipts.
Three teams won with their offense playing in the red
This is the fun one. New England, Cincinnati and Minnesota all won their games this week with their offense grading out negative — meaning if you covered up the final score and just watched the tape, you'd have guessed all three of them lost. New England beat Pittsburgh 20-3 on the strength of a fumble-return touchdown while Drake Maye's own numbers were underwater. Minnesota won 9-3 on 246 total yards. The Vikings are 2-0 right now on defense and special teams, not quarterback play — neither Carson Wentz nor (in his brief, concussion-shortened cameo in Week 1) Kyler Murray has a positive grade yet this season, and Murray's the one taking over under center this week.
Buffalo just had the most dominant clean game nobody's talking about
The Bills beat the Lions by 10. The actual football says it should've been more like 18. Buffalo out-gained Detroit 449 yards to 355, averaged 6.8 yards a play, and posted the biggest net-EPA margin of the week that wasn't padded by the other team's turnovers — Carolina and New England both technically graded a shade higher (see below), but each of those rode a takeaway avalanche or a fumble-return score, not their own offense doing damage on schedule for four quarters. Buffalo's number is clean, snap after snap, and it's buried under a final score that looks like a normal one-score win because Jared Goff had himself a game on the other side (one of the best individual quarterback performances of the entire week, in a loss). Two really good teams played Thursday night and one of them just happened to have the better quarterback day.
Seattle didn't just beat Arizona, they buried them
31-7 undersells it. Arizona finished with 151 total yards on the day — 3.2 yards a play — the single worst offensive showing by anybody in the league this week. Drew Lock, starting in place of the still-out Sam Darnold, had one of the best quarterback games of the entire slate. This wasn't competitive past the first quarter.
Carolina's blowout was mostly a gift
The Panthers put up 34 points on Atlanta and it looked like a statement. Some of it was — Bryce Young had a legitimately good game. But Atlanta also turned the ball over five times, including a pick-six, and one of the golden rules of football analytics is that turnover luck doesn't repeat. Carolina's defense forced that pile of takeaways; don't assume they'll do it again next week just because the final score says 31 points.
The three-turnover away game: Chargers self-destruct in a winnable one
Total yardage was basically even between the Raiders and Chargers on Sunday — 310 to 308. Las Vegas won by 12 anyway, because Los Angeles turned the ball over three times. Not much more to say here: this was a game the Chargers were competitive in and lost entirely to their own mistakes.
Houston went for it four times on fourth down. They converted zero.
Cincinnati beat Houston by two touchdowns despite getting out-gained by more than 100 yards. The Texans were the most aggressive team in the league on fourth down this week — four attempts, the most of anybody — and didn't convert a single one. Aggressive is usually good. Aggressive and 0-for-4 is how you lose a game you were winning on paper.
The San Francisco game that flew under the radar
Miami-San Francisco ended 35-13 and got overshadowed by everything else on the Sunday slate, but the 49ers posted the best per-snap efficiency numbers of anybody in Week 2 — 8.2 yards a play, a 63% success rate, both tops in the league — on just 47 plays. That's a rate, not a total: Buffalo's game above still adds up to more total value because they did their damage over 19 more plays. Two different ways of measuring "dominant," two different answers — San Francisco was the most efficient per snap, Buffalo did the most total damage cleanly. Either way, San Francisco remains the best team in football by our full-season power rankings, two games in, and it isn't especially close.
Where everybody stands, going forward
Full 32-team power rankings, garbage-time excluded, every team now with two real games in the book: Top 5 — 49ers, Ravens, Bills, Seahawks, Jets. Bottom 5 — Dolphins, Chargers, Falcons, Buccaneers, Colts (dead last).
The Colts finish last in the league this week after getting out-gained by nearly 200 yards in a Chiefs loss that also happened to go to overtime — not a good combination. On the other end, Baltimore, Buffalo, Seattle, the Jets and Kansas City are all bunched within half a point of each other behind San Francisco, which remains in a class of its own after two weeks.
The bottom line
Two full weeks in, the scoreboard and the stat sheet are telling two different stories on a good chunk of the league. Buffalo and Kansas City both deserved bigger margins than they got. New England, Minnesota and Cincinnati won games their own offenses didn't earn. And Carolina's blowout owes more to Atlanta's five turnovers than anything Carolina's offense did on its own. Two data points beats one, every time, and this week made that pretty clear.