NFL Scoring Plummets After Season Started With Ratings Dip

It was a Sunday of reduced scoring in the NFL and apparently calamitous injuries to prominent young quarterbacks.

The Bears scored 56 fewer points than they’d scored in their season opener and lost Caleb Williams to a hamstring injury. The Commanders dropped to 0–2 and lost Jayden Daniels, the star quarterback taken one spot after Williams atop the 2024 NFL Draft, to another injury to his left elbow that had analyst Tom Brady uttering a profanity on the Fox broadcast.

“Oh, shit,” Brady said on the air as the replay of Daniels suffering his injury was shown. “Excuse me. I was not expecting to see that.”

NFL defenses got their revenge after the league-wide scoring-fest in the season’s opening weekend.

Teams totaled 791 points in Week 1, equaling the most ever in the opening week of an NFL season. But things were much tougher for offenses on the Sunday of Week 2.

“Where is all the points?” Fox studio analyst Terry Bradshaw said on the network’s halftime show during the early-afternoon games.

The 13 afternoon games Sunday had an average of 36.8 points. The league-wide average in Week 2, boosted by the 72 points in the Bills-Lions game Thursday night, was 39.3 points with two games remaining.

That was well down from 49.4 points per game in Week 1, with Sunday night and Monday night games still remaining.

The NFL told coaches and players last week in its Week 2 officiating video that the competition committee had designated illegal contact by defensive backs on receivers in the secondary and offensive pass interference as points of clarification—formerly known as points of emphasis—for this season. And the committee traditionally has had illegal contact stressed when it wanted to help passing games and boost scoring, largely because the league and rule-makers believe high-scoring games are attractive to fans and helpful for viewership.

Even so, the NFL’s opening-week viewership was mixed. The Week 1 games averaged 19.5 million viewers. That was down 13% from Week 1 last season and down 9% from 2024. But it was still the NFL’s third-most-watched opening week in the last 10 seasons. ESPN had its most-watched Week 1 Monday Night Football game in its 20-year history with the program.

Williams, drafted first overall in 2024, helped the Bears to reach the divisional round of last season’s NFC playoffs under the guidance of Ben Johnson, then the team’s first-year coach. They resembled Super Bowl contenders and led the Week 1 scoring surge with their 59—37 victory at Carolina.

But they lost, 9—3, at home Sunday to the Vikings. Williams was taken from the field on a cart after injuring himself while running with the ball. He is expected to undergo an MRI exam Monday.

“We’ll see how bad it is tomorrow,” Johnson said during his postgame news conference. “And we’ll go from there.”

Johnson described Williams as being “in good spirits.” But this Sunday, there was no talk from the Bears about breaking the NFL’s single-season scoring record.

“We said it at halftime just to the team that it was going to come down to the very end, when you’re facing a good opponent like this,” Johnson said. “Conditions were the way that they were. You know, points were going to be few and far between when it’s like that. And so you kind of feel that in the first half.”

It was even worse for the Commanders. Daniels helped them reach the NFC championship game as a rookie in the 2024 season. But he suffered a dislocated left elbow during a disappointing 2025 season in which the Commanders went 5—12. He injured the elbow on his non-throwing arm again on the final play of the first half of Sunday’s 37—20 loss to the Cowboys and was taken from the field on a cart at halftime.

Daniels left AT&T Stadium with his left arm in a sling. Commanders coach Dan Quinn said during his postgame news conference that Daniels again suffered a dislocated elbow. There is no fracture, according to Quinn, and Daniels is scheduled to undergo further testing Monday.

“I know what he’s gone through,” Quinn said.

Another Commanders season may already be in ruins.

“We will rally so hard around Marcus [Mariota, the team’s backup quarterback] until Jayden is back,” Quinn said.

In addition to the quarterback injuries, Sunday’s games were affected by weather issues that included extreme heat in Nashville for Titans-Eagles, a lightning delay of more than two hours in Tampa for Browns-Buccaneers and rain in other cities. Mostly, though, the lower scoring may have been just part of the normal ebb and flow of an NFL season and a reversion to the usual mean of defenses being ahead of offenses early on.

Before Sunday’s games, analysts such as former Steelers coach Mike Tomlin and former Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman had cited the poor tackling league-wide by defenses in Week 1. 

This time, it was NFL offenses—rather than defenses—that were left to regroup and search for answers.

“We’ll take a look at what it was that was a little bit off,” Johnson said. “And we’ll get it cleaned up.”