Originally Posted by
Bill the cop
I don't want to pile on, but you are obviously confused. Whether you were talking about NFLX or regular season, the statement "roughly half of the games won by exactly "3" occur in overtime" is not even close to being accurate. In the regular season 15.9% of all games are decided by 3 points (705 games since 1994), but only 205 of those decided by 3 were in OT. The same pattern occurs in NFLX games (15.3% are decided by 3, etc.). I cut and pasted the following from a post I made last week in another forum.
" Also, you often hear that coaches don't like going into OT preseason, right? Well that's correct, only 2.2%
of NFLX games go into OT, compared to 6.2% of regular season games. As a side note, have you ever
had +3.5 points going into OT and got screwed by the other team scoring a TD? Here's some historical data,
since 1994 there have been 274 OT games, 205 (or 75%) were decided by 3 (or less), and 69 (or 25%) by 6.
You probably won about half of the 6 point games, so going into OT with +3.5 points should cash about 88%
of the time (it just SEEMS like that 12% bites you in the ass more often). Just one more trivia stat, of the 274
OT games, 4 ended 0-0 in OT."