Scoring in the NFL
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Welcome to Fun Fact Friyay! This newsletter is all about keeping things brief and sending you off into the world smarter, wiser, and happier.
Today’s fact: The most common NFL score is 20-17.
The NFL season kicked off last week, meaning your pigskin-loving friends will go through erratic mood swings over the next four to five months based on the success of their favorite teams.
In any given week, there are up to 16 games across the league. That volume, combined with multiple different ways to put up points — six for a touchdown, three for a field goal, two for a safety or two-point conversion, and one for an extra point — yields the potential for a lot of different scores. More than 1,000 unique combinations, in fact.
Thankfully, we’ve got a beautiful site called Scorigami (a term coined by SB Nation’s Jon Bois) to keep track of all these different outcomes. Just look at the graph on that site!
And per Scorigami, the most common NFL score is 20-17, which has happened 283 times over the course of history.
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The next most common score is 27-24 (230 times) and 17-14 (200 times).
Coincidentally, none of these scores happened in Week 1. But we did get a BRAND NEW Scorigami, thanks to the Baltimore Ravens and Houston Texans. The Ravens knocked off Houston 25-9, a score that, prior to September 10, 2023, had never happened.
If you’re ever watching a game with someone who gets very riled up — or perhaps you are that person — feel free to head over to the Scorigami Twitter account, developed by multi-time Jeopardy! champion Dave Mattingly.
Your team might not win, but you can at least take some pleasure in seeing if they’ll achieve a score we’ve never witnessed. That’s just as good.