NFL Gets Explosive Sunday of Scoring After Sluggish Start

The first Sunday afternoon of the NFL season was a scoring fest.

Just as league officials generally like it.

After some relatively sluggish offensive play during the standalone primetime games Wednesday night in Seattle and Thursday night in Australia, NFL quarterbacks and their offenses got things revved up Sunday. The 12 games in the 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. ET windows totaled 645 points, or 53.75 points per game.

The Giants and Cowboys added 48 points to the total Sunday night. Monday night’s 31–10 Chiefs win over the Broncos meant that 791 points were scored in Week 1, tying the Week 1 record from 2012.

Many teams’ starting quarterbacks play little during the preseason. That might suggest that NFL defenses should be ahead of offenses in Week 1 of the regular season.

But former Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, now an NFL analyst for NBC, said on air during halftime of the Sunday night game that he thinks the way teams practice now favors offenses early in the season; teams do much less hitting in practice than they once did.

“Defenses spend less time shedding blocks and tackling than they used to,” Tomlin said.

NFL leaders traditionally like high-scoring games with wide-open offensive play, believing it appeals to fans and boosts broadcast viewership. The league’s competition committee watches the points-per-game metric closely and historically has made rule adjustments—such as cracking down on illegal contact by defensive backs on receivers in the secondary—when offenses and passing games have needed a boost.

Defensive players have complained over the years that the rules are heavily tilted in favor of offenses, although some of the rule changes that have irked them the most have been safety-related restrictions involving types of hits that are now illegal.

The formula has worked well, given the league’s popularity. The NFL averaged 18.7 million viewers per game during the 2025 regular season, up 10% from 2024 and its most since 1989.

The offenses certainly were in charge Sunday afternoon. The Bears led the way with a 59–37 win over the Panthers in Charlotte. The 96 points were an NFL record for a Week 1 game. The two teams combined for 1,030 total yards, making it the first NFL game with 95 or more points and 1,000 or more total yards since the Rams’ 54–51 win over the Chiefs in 2018.

“I’m sure there will be a number of things that we see on tape that we need to address, and we can continue to get better at,” Bears coach Ben Johnson said during his postgame news conference. “But I thought it was a good start.”

The Bears’ 59 points were tied for the second-most ever by a single team in a season-opening game, three behind the record set by the 1973 Falcons.

It was just the sort of offensive wizardry the Bears and their fans envisioned when the team hired Johnson, the former offensive coordinator of the Lions, as head coach before last season. Johnson helped quarterback Caleb Williams, the No. 1 overall selection in the 2024 NFL Draft, raise his level last season, and Chicago reached the divisional round of the NFC playoffs. Now it’s off to a superb start to this season.

“His process was really good throughout,” Johnson said. “And then I could kind of tell last night. We do our quarterback meeting one last time and, I mean, he was on top of it. Everything, he was rattling out, just ‘where my eyes need to be, what I’m thinking.’ … And so I went to bed. I slept really well with that in mind.”

Johnson has spoken of trying to have the highest-scoring team in NFL history. Nothing that happened Sunday quieted such talk.

“Listen, that’ll always be the goal is we want to be the highest-scoring,” he said. “We want to have the most wins. We want to win Super Bowls. Like, that’s what we do. We didn’t get into this profession trying to be mediocre or average. And that’s every NFL team. So that is what it is.”

The Bears weren’t alone. The Ravens scored 41 points Sunday. The Bengals, Lions, Saints, Bills, Texans, Jaguars, and Vikings joined the Panthers in scoring at least 30 points each. The Panthers, Saints, and Texans did so while losing. The Vikings scored 39 points even though their starting quarterback, Kyler Murray, left the game after sustaining a concussion on an illegal hit on a first-half scramble.

The 10 teams scoring 30 or more points tied the third-most in a Week 1 in NFL history. The six teams that scored at least 24 first-half points Sunday were the most ever in a Week 1.