The goal of an NFL game is to win the game. If your opponent scores 17 points, you want to score 18 points, but anything more than 18 points is unnecessary. On the other hand, if you lose a game, all of the points you scored were unnecessary: losing 17-0 counts the same as losing 17-16.

With that logic, most points in an NFL game are “wasted” or unnecessary points. The Bengals started the season 0-11, so all points scored by Cincinnati were wasted during that stretch. In the 12th game, when Cincinnati won 22-6, you could claim that 15 of the 22 points scored were wasted, too. That means 172 of the 179 points scored by the Bengals this year — or 96% — were wasted points. Said differently, Cincinnati could have scored 7 points this year, not 172, and if allocated correctly, have the same record.

For Seattle, it’s a different story. The Seahawks are 10-2 and have scored 329 points; the minimum number of points Seattle could have scored and still achieved a 10-2 record is 240 points, given how many points the team has allowed each week. That means only 27% of the Seahawks points this year have been “wasted” points:

The graph below shows all 32 teams in the NFL this season.  The X-Axis shows points per game; the Y-Axis shows the “wasted” points per game, based on the following formula:

• In a win, all points scored after 1 point more than your opponent scored are wasted.  In a 20-17 victory, there are 2 wasted points.  In a 30-17 victory, there are 12 wasted points.
• In a loss, all points scored are wasted points.
• In a tie, since a tie is half a win, half of the points are wasted (i.e., you could have scored 0 points and had zero wins).

We can also look at this on a percentage basis. As you might suspect, the Bengals have wasted the highest percentage of their team’s points this year, at 96%, while the Seahawks have wasted the lowest percentage, at just 27%.

In its simplest terms, what we are solving for here is the fewest amount of points a team could have scored and still finished with the same record. And as it turns out, the Seahawks are historic outliers. Since 1970, the most “efficient” team at scoring was the 2016 Raiders. Oakland scored 416 points that season, and in 4 losses, scored 28, 13, 10, and 6 points for a total of 57 points. In the team’s 12 wins, the Raiders average margin of victory was only 6.67, which means only 5.67 points per game were wasted in wins, or 68 total. Overall, this means the Raiders wasted only 125 of the team’s 416 points; said differently, for the 2016 Raiders to go 12-4, given how many points they allowed in each game, the team needed to score at least 291 points. They actually scored 416, so the team only “wasted” 30% of their points. That’s the lowest of any team since 1970.

The table below shows the amount of wasted points by each team from 1970 to 2018.

If the Seahawks can keep this up, they will wind up being the most efficient team at distributing their points across games for any team since 1970.