Here's How We'll Handle the Brett Favre Chatter: Interception Returns for Scores

This idea (well, without Favre reference) comes courtesy of Carrington Harrison from 610 sports radio, but you don’t have to work in radio, owe me money or be an immediate family member to suggest a topic.

I went back over the last decade, and here are the winning percentages when a team scores each type of non-offensive touchdown:

Teams that have an interception return touchdown win about 80% of their games, while teams with a kickoff return win about 55%. Does this somehow mean that teams should strive for the former rather than the latter? No. It means that interception return touchdowns tend to occur with a team already in the lead, and they are correlated with victory, while we know that kickoff return touchdowns (with the exception of those starting the half) occur after the other team has just scored.

To illustrate this, here’s a breakdown of the score situation when the non-offensive touchdown occurred, showing the percentage of games when the scoring team already had the lead, when they took the lead with the non-offensive touchdown, and when they were still trailing after the score.

Only 8.1% of interception return touchdowns over the last decade occur in situations where the intercepting team is down by 8 or more. Teams holding a lead force fewer throws and generate far fewer interception return opportunities. On the other hand, blocked punt returns, blocked field goal returns, and kickoff returns have occurred more often when the team is trailing by more than one score.

[photo via Getty, all data via pro-football-reference’s touchdown game finder]