Fastest opening touchdown
Whose touchdown lands earliest on the game clock when games run side by side ·
2024–2025 regular season + playoffs · 567 games, 2,920 touchdowns
THE QUESTION. Take every game kicking off in the same window and start a stopwatch at each one.
Whose touchdown lands first? The Fastest opener is the player whose touchdown came the fewest seconds into their game,
measured on the game clock, compared against every other game on the slate. Actual kickoff times do not
matter. Within any one game, “first TD” and “fastest TD” are the same event, so the
race is entirely between games.
The headline
Median winning time
—
game clock elapsed
Decided inside 5:00
—
of simulated slates
D/ST slate share
—
vs 5.0% of all TDs
Position lift on 1st TD
None
all positions ~1.0x
Slate size
8
A typical Sunday early window is 8 games. Drag to see how the
race changes — more games means a faster winning time and more weight on the extreme tail.
1 · Being first tells you nothing about position
Every position scores the first TD of a game at almost exactly
its overall rate. The separation only appears once games compete against each other.
| Position | All TDs | Share | 1st TD of game | Share | 1st-TD lift | Fastest opener | Slate lift |
|---|
Lift = share of that column divided by share of all TDs. 1.00x means no separation.
fastest opener column recomputes with the slider.
Position share across the three stages
All TDs (baseline)
First TD of game
Fastest opener
2 · When the slate is won
Distribution of the winning touchdown's elapsed game time across
all possible windows of the selected size. This is the bar a touchdown has to clear to be first.
Winning first-TD time — 8-game slate
| Elapsed game time | Share of slates | Cumulative | Share of individual games |
|---|
Last column is how often a single game's first TD lands in that window. The gap
between the two is the whole point: this is the left tail of 8 draws, not a typical game.
3 · Which scoring types land earliest
Scoring type, ranked by how much it outperforms its base rate in
the slate race. Defensive and return scores need no offensive drive, so they can land inside 20 seconds.
| Scoring type | All TDs | Share | Was 1st TD of a game | fastest opener share | Lift |
|---|
The Was 1st TD of a game column is the sample the fastest opener share is actually
built from. Counts under 6 are shown in red — treat those lifts as directional only. Kickoff returns are
the clearest case: 15 occurred across both seasons, but only 4 were their game's first TD, and only 3 of those
came on the opening kickoff. The other 11 came in games where a touchdown had already been scored, so they could
not be first. A kickoff return can still open the scoring after field goals — one of the four did, on a
second-half kickoff in a 6–6 game.
4 · What a winner actually looks like
Players and units who scored the first touchdown of a game more than
once across the two seasons. High counts mostly reflect volume and goal-line role, not speed — check the
fastest column, which is what the slate race actually rewards.
| # | Player / unit | Pos | 1st TDs | Fastest | Median |
|---|
5 · What this cannot tell you
The coin toss decides most of this, and you cannot see it. The team receiving the opening kickoff
takes about 75% of all fastest-opener probability — they simply get the ball first. But the toss
happens minutes before kickoff, so it is unknowable in advance. Across 2024–2025 no
team reliably receives (year-over-year correlation in receive rate: 0.10), no team scores faster than
chance when it does receive, and the game total barely moves the needle. Treat any confident prediction with
suspicion — including your own.
What survives: defenses win this far more often than their base rate,
far more often than their base rate would suggest. That is the one durable pattern on this page, and it
holds because a defensive or return score needs no offensive drive to get there.
METHOD & CAVEATS
- Play-by-play from nflverse. Times are the game clock when the ball crossed the goal line, derived from the following extra-point snap (the clock stops on a score), not the snap of the touchdown play itself.
- fastest-opener probability is computed exactly, not simulated: for each game, the chance its first TD is fastest equals the chance all other slate games are drawn from the games with slower first TDs.
- Passing TDs are credited to the receiver. All return and defensive scores are grouped as D/ST.
- 567 games had at least one TD. 3 further games produced zero touchdowns and can never yield a fastest opener.
- Single-season D/ST slate share moved from 9.4% (2024) to 16.9% (2025). The pooled figure is the better estimate, but the spread is wide — do not treat the multiple as precise.
- All games are treated as interchangeable draws; a real 1:00 PM slate is 8 specific matchups.