There are few joys in sports like the first Sunday of the NFL season. After an entire offseason without professional football, we finally get a flood of Week 1 games all at once. NFL Red Zone springs to life for the first time since January. Some years, the anticipation can be more exciting than the actual action, with offenses playing in the regular season together for the first time struggling to find a rhythm. This year, though, offensive struggles were few and far between. Nine different teams scored 30 or more points in the early window on Sunday, just the second time that has ever happened. And with the Vikings unexpectedly making it to 39 points in their comeback win over the Packers, 10 teams scored 30 or more points in all on Sunday. That's the first time that has happened since 2002 and just the third time it has happened on the opening Sunday of the NFL season since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970 (1986 being the other).

Some of those big scores were a product of uncommon circumstances. The Lions and Saints went to overtime, when they each scored a touchdown. The Vikings scored four consecutive touchdowns in the second half to come back against Green Bay, with three of those drives starting deep in Packers territory after a big kickoff return and two defensive turnovers, making life easier for a Carson Wentz-led offense to rack up points. A Bengals defense that forced and recovered four fumbles against the Buccaneers took one to the house for a defensive score and set up the offense with two short fields.

Others attempted to keep up in shootouts but fell short. The Texans managed 31 points against a conservative Bills defense in C.J. Stroud's first start since his playoff meltdown. But after driving into the red zone in the last minute of the game, Stroud was sacked twice on the final three plays, including on a three-man rush that produced a game-ending strip sack. And while the Panthers scored 37 points on a day when Bryce Young threw for 361 yards, well, the Bears scored more points on offense than any team has since the Dolphins went for 70 in September 2023.

Today, I'm going to focus on the four other teams that hit 30-plus points and how their offenses got off to blistering-hot starts. The Bears, Bills, Jaguars and Ravens all had high hopes for their offenses heading into Week 1, but they scored a combined 170 points in their season-opening victories. How did they pull that off? Were the defenses more to blame? Or should we be projecting these offenses to lead the league in scoring the rest of the way? I'll run through all four, starting in Chicago, where the Bears heard Ben Johnson say that he wanted to field the highest-scoring offense in NFL history and proceeded to tie the 2019 Ravens in scoring the most points on offense of any team in NFL history in a season-opening performance.