NFL Week 1 scoring did not creep up on anybody. Ten teams put up 30 or more on Sunday, and the league headed into Monday night averaging 25 points per game, the most prolific opening weekend since the merger in 1970. Chicago led it with 59. Baltimore hung 41, Buffalo 36, Jacksonville 34. That is not a good weekend for offense. That is a weekend that ends up in the record book.
Fifty-nine is the number that keeps rattling around my head. Nobody accidentally scores 59 points in September. You score 59 because the operation is already clean in a month when most operations are still finding the light switch, and because the other side never got a stop to change the rhythm of the thing. The reporting has Chicago's afternoon tying historic milestones, and you can see why. Points like that stop being an offensive stat and start being a franchise artifact.
Checked the almanac on the Bears and points: this is the same organization that hung 73 on Washington in the 1940 NFL Championship Game, still the most lopsided title game the league has ever staged. Eighty-six years later they had another Sunday people will talk about. Then back to business.
The real question is whether any of it holds. Week 1 has always tilted toward offense. Starters have barely played together in August, defensive communication is the last thing to arrive, and coordinators spend the opener covering for installations nobody has live-repped against a stranger. Historically the scoring curve flattens as tape accumulates and defenses catch up. I would expect some of that here. I would also say 25 a game across the board is too broad to be one fluke Sunday.
What comes next is immediate. Denver visits Kansas City tonight to close the week, and the reporting out of Kansas City says Patrick Mahomes made it back for Week 1 exactly 274 days after the most significant injury of his career, which is its own kind of story regardless of what the scoreboard reads. Buffalo hosts Detroit on Thursday on a short week, the first real test of whether that 36 travels into a quick turnaround.
I am watching Week 2 defensive tackling and third-down stops, because that is where this either normalizes or becomes the season's defining trend.