The Art of Scorigami
By KATHERINE MCDONOUGH ‘19
Sunday, October 14th was quite the night for Boston sports: the Red Sox beat the Houston Astros 7-1 to tie up the American League Championship Series, the Patriots defeated the previously-undefeated Kansas City Chiefs 43-40 in an important conference game, and ‘Scorigami’—a term coined by SB Nation sportswriter and video producer Jon Bois—happened. Scorigami is achieved when an NFL game ends in a score that has never happened before in NFL history.
Scorigami is possible in all the other “Big Four” sports, basketball, baseball, and hockey, but football remains the only one in which Scorigami is both interesting and prevalent. Baseball, Basketball, and Hockey are each scored in increments of 1, which means that the “building blocks,” as Jon Bois describes it, are not that interesting. Yes, 3-pointers exist in basketball, but someone can score just one point on a missed free throw as well, so the building blocks of the game are in increments of 1, 2, and 3, meaning that any score can be pretty easily achieved with those three intervals. Football’s scoring, however, is notoriously strange.
Football’s point system consists of building blocks of 2, 3, 6, 7, and 8. A team can score 2 points with a safety, 3 points with a field goal, 6 points with a touchdown with a missed extra point or conversion, 7 points with a touchdown and an extra point, and 8 points with a touchdown and a 2-point conversion. Some of these building blocks are more common than others; for instance, in the 2017 season, there were 1,225 touchdowns but only 37 safeties. In order from most to least common in the 2017 season are the 7pt Touchdown, according to Pro-Football Reference, (51% of all scoring opportunities), 3pt Field Goal (41%), 6pt Touchdown (6%), 8pt Touchdown (<2%), and 2pt safety (<1%). Football’s strange building blocks and massive discrepancy between frequency of each score, combined with the fact that most football games have a good amount of scoring, means that some scores are super hard to obtain. For instance, a team ending a game with only 2 or 4 points means that throughout the entire game, the team only scored safeties. A team ending with a score of 8 would mean that they scored one touchdown with a 2pt conversion, or they scored a touchdown, missed and got a safety, or got two field goals and a safety. Any of these outcomes are unusual in the natural flow of a football game. Because of these trends, there are plenty of low-score Scorigami games to be played; however, the odds of them being played are very slim.
High-score Scorigamis are another game all-together. High-score Scorigamis occur when one or both teams dominate on offense, racking up an unprecedented amount of points in one game. One team crushing the other is most common in this case: the record blow-out Scorigami is 73-0, where the Bears defeated the Redskins in 1940. The highest scorigami in more recent years (post-2000), however, is the absolute demolition of Colts by the Saints, 62-7, in 2011.
High-score Scorigami in situations like last Sunday are, in my opinion, more interesting. Where not just the winning team, but both teams score an insane amount of points. Sunday’s Patriots game didn’t have any trademark Scorigami signs, no safety or 2pt conversion, just a ton of offense. It achieved Scorigami since both the Patriots and Chiefs offenses played so well that no other team in NFL history has been able to make that score before. That’s not to say there hasn’t been closer or higher scores in the NFL (the highest Scorigami tie in NFL history also belongs to the Patriots in 1986, 43-43, and the highest 1-pt discrepancy is 48-47 in 1983), but the fact that no other game in the history of the sport has been able to make that score is pretty cool.
Since there have been a total of 16,100 games played in the history of the NFL, the art of Scorigami becomes harder and harder with each passing week. Football exists in this strange, dreamlike land that harbors Scorigami: the point-system is weird enough that each game is different, but there have been so many played games and so many common scores that the achievement of a Scorigami is still special. Next time you’re watching a football game, I recommend you go to nflscorigami.com or check out the Scorigami Twitter handle (@NFL_scorigami, they give the score updates and the real-time odds for each game’s chance at Scorigami) to see if the game might just end in a victorious Scorigami.
