It’s time to answer another question from a comment on my comprehensive study on end-of-half scoring.
Yesterday, I wrote an article to answer the first question from a Rumbler on whether or not end-of-half scoring correlates to wins.
Turns out it does.
Teams that outscore their opponents in the final two minutes of the half won 65.6% of the time in the 25-year sample from 2001 – 2025.
On this glorious Saturday in Western New York, let’s attack the next questions from Rumbler PaulieB here:
To answer it
the best way I could, that actually had a large enough sample to pull from, I extended the double-dip question on either side of the half to four minutes. I did that simply because there was a very small percentage of games with points in the final two minutes of the first half AND in the first two minutes of the second half.
Also, I’ve regularly heard the double-dip window as “the middle eight” or the final four minutes at the end of the second quarter and first four of the third quarter.
Does scoring in the double-dip window correlate to wins?
See for yourself here in this table:
That’s a pretty striking percentage on the double-dip win rate, especially when it’s compared to a team’s win percentage when they don’t score in either window.
Of course, the double dip doesn’t happen super often, only 13.5% of the time in this study’s quarter-century sample.
But when it does, the team accomplishing it is in darn-good shape to win that football game, which is why we’ve seen teams regularly chasing the double dip.
That 73.7% in the table is not necessarily the “classic” double dip. All a team needed to do is have scored in both windows. I included that figure in the table it’s essentially the exact same as the classic double dip, which is scoring right before the half then getting the ball out of halftime and scoring within the first four minutes of the third quarter.
The winning percentage for the classic version of the double dip was 73.3% in the sample.
And remember those five-year timeframe segments from the original article (2001 – 2005, 2006 – 2010 etc.)?
The double-dip winning percentage wasn’t buoyed by one segment in particular. In fact, that winning percentage has never dipped — pun intended — below 70% in any segment or climbed higher than 75%.
It’s at 71.4% through Week 3 in the 2026 season.
As for the Bills, they’ve only double dipped seven times — six occurrences in the regular season and one time in the playoffs — since the start of the 2020 campaign.
Their record when doing so is 7-0.
So, yes, teams should make a concerted effort to double dip. It correlates rather strongly with winning the football game.
