Super Bowl LIX Coin Toss, First Drive, and First Touchdown Scorer Trends

The Super Bowl LIX matchup is set, as the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles in the final game of the NFL season. There's no shortage of storylines ahead of the big game, and that includes the coin toss, first drive, and first touchdown scorer trends to dig into ahead of the championship game.

The Super Bowl LIX matchup is set, as the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles in the final game of the NFL season.

There's no shortage of storylines ahead of the big game, and that includes the coin toss, first drive, and first touchdown scorer trends to dig into ahead of the championship game.

Here's what you should know ahead of Super Bowl LIX's early-game trends.

Super Bowl LIX Coin Toss Trends

While it's common for NFL teams to defer coin tosses and receive the second-half kickoff, that trend has really applied for this year's Super Bowl competitors.

The Eagles won 12 coin tosses (via Pro-Football-Reference) this year and deferred on every single one of those flip wins, thus choosing to kick the ball away in the first half and receive the second-half kickoff instead.

The Chiefs won nine tosses this year. They also deferred every win.

Also, for the sake of completeness, when these two teams met in Super Bowl LVII, the Chiefs won the toss -- and deferred to the second half.

So, no, we don't have an angle where one team likes to receive and one team always kicks to open games, and we at least know that history suggests the toss winner will elect to kick off to start the game.

Super Bowl LIX First Drive Trends

These are some of the best teams in football, so it's not that surprising that they have some strong early-game splits.

Here are the first-drive results and ranks for each team.

For example, 36.8% of the Chiefs' opening drives resulted in a touchdown, which ranks fifth in the NFL.

The Chiefs have scored a touchdown on 57.9% of their opening drives in some form or fashion (36.8% touchdown drives and 21.1% field goal drives), which is the third-highest rate in football.

They have scored four times in their last five games (four touchdown drives and a punt -- though the punt was in Week 18 when the starters were out for rest).

As for the Eagles, they have a 40.0% score rate (25.0% touchdown drives and 15.0% field goal drives -- excluding a missed field goal).

However, they had a really poor start to the season on opening drives, as seen above.

It wasn't until Week 16 (their 15th game of the season) that the Eagles scored an opening drive touchdown.

Since (and including that week), they have scored a touchdown on five of six of their opening drives -- including four straight games.

Super Bowl LIX To First Score Trends

So, we know that these are good teams but that they like to defer the opening kickoff.

Even with that, they've heavily outpaced the first-score odds compared to their first-possession odds.

The New Orleans Saints won a toss against the Chiefs and chose to receive, thus explaining the discrepancy in flip win percentage and opening kickoffs received percentage.

Kansas City -- despite receiving just 47.4% of opening kickoffs -- scored first in their games 57.9% of the time, a 10.5-point differential.

For the Eagles, that number is greater: +25.0.

In addition to winning 60.0% of their coin tosses (again, deferring all of them), two teams won the toss and elected to receive the opening kick against the Eagles, giving them just a 30.0% game-opening drive rate.

Despite that, they scored first in 11 of 20 games (55.0%).

Super Bowl LIX First Touchdown Scorer Trends

So, we now know that these teams like to give away the opening possession but still tend to score first more often than not.

But what about the first touchdown scorer? When each team in this game scores first, who is that player (or unit)?

To clarify, I'm counting just the first team touchdowns here. Therefore, if the offense kicked a field goal already or if the opposing team scored before the Chiefs or Eagles, I'm still looking at the offense's (or defense's) eventual first scorer to get a holistic view of early-game scoring trends.

While the Eagles were scarce on opening-drive touchdowns for most of the season, when they did eventually score their first touchdown of the game, Saquon Barkley was most often that guy, scoring 6 of their 20 first TDs.

The other Eagles with multiple opening touchdowns were Jalen Hurts (five) and A.J. Brown (three).

The Eagles defense did score an opening TD when C.J. Gardner-Johnson had a 69-yard pick-six in Week 17