We read the four completed NFL preseason games: the losers went 0-for-5 in the red zone, the winners 12-for-13

Four NFL preseason games reached their finals Thursday and Friday night. We read all four — every drive, every scoring play, every trip inside the 20. One number sorted the winners from the losers, and it was not yardage or possession. It was red-zone touchdowns. The four winning teams — the Jets, Panthers, Raiders and 49ers — reached the red zone 13 times and scored 12 touchdowns. The four that lost — the Steelers, Jaguars, Texans and Chargers — reached it 5 times and scored none. That was not four one-sided games in which the losers never threatened. Three of the four beaten teams reached the red zone; they combined for 1,008 yards; two of them led on the stat sheet in the places you'd expect to find a winner. Pittsburgh had more first downs than the Jets (14 to 12) and held the ball longer (31:02 to 28:58), and was shut out 17-0. Jacksonville gained 318 yards and reached the Carolina red zone twice — and came away with a Cam Little field goal each time, both snapped from the 17. Houston was the sharp version of the pattern. The Texans scored 20 points and never ran a snap inside the Raiders' 20: a 20-yard touchdown run, an 80-yard interception return, and field goals of 51 and 57 yards. They led 17-0, then 20-3. Las Vegas answered with three red-zone possessions and three touchdowns — the last a 1-yard Aidan O'Connell run with 14 seconds to play — and won 22-20. Add it up and the four losing offenses scored 3 touchdowns between them, all from outside the 20 and none from inside it. Two of the four teams also scored on defense — Houston on the 80-yard pick-six, the Chargers on a 16-yard one — but neither offense reached the end zone from inside the 20.

The following is analysis, not fact. Yardage did track the scoreboard here — the winners out-gained the losers in all four games — but the margin lived at the goal line ^mmodeled. The losing offenses moved the ball into scoring range and then didn't finish: five red-zone trips, five stalls, a field goal or nothing each time. The winners turned 12 of those 13 trips into touchdowns. That is the part a box score buries. A team that gains 318 yards and loses by 17, or scores 20 points and loses by 2, looks on paper like it belonged in the game — and it did, right up to the 20-yard line ^mmodeled. The exhibition weeks are where teams sort third-string quarterbacks and roster bubbles, and what separated these four results was not who moved the ball but who cashed it: the most compressed, highest-leverage stretch of the field, where a rebuilt line and an unfamiliar quarterback have the least room to work ^mmodeled.

Four games is a thin sample, and a dozen more were still to be played — the next slate could scramble the split entirely ^mmodeled. Red-zone touchdown rate is also partly downstream of the result: a team rarely wins without scoring touchdowns and rarely loses while scoring several, so a 12-of-13 to 0-of-5 gap describes how these margins happened as much as why ^mmodeled. And preseason rosters rotate by the quarter — the units stalling inside the 20 weren't always the same players who drove there, and none of it is the group that will take Week 1 snaps ^sspeculative. What survives is narrow and real: across these four completed games, the beaten teams reached the red zone and scored no touchdowns there.

On a broadcast, Houston's 20-3 lead looked like control, and Pittsburgh's edge in first downs and time of possession looked like the better team. Read to the goal line, both were teams that couldn't finish a drive — and both lost.