The art of inventing a final score that has never existed

History · Published 7 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: In the world of sports, some outcomes are so statistically improbable they break the historical record. These are scorigamis: final scores that have never occurred before in a league's history. From NFL blowouts to soccer upsets, these unique results represent the ultimate statistical outliers of human competition.

The term 'scorigami' is a portmanteau of 'score' and 'origami,' coined in 2014 by sportswriter Jon Bois. It describes the act of producing a final score in a game that has never happened before. While the concept has been applied to various sports, it is most prominent in American football. Because football points are scored in uneven increments—touchdowns (6), field goals (3), and safeties (2)—certain scorelines are mathematically more probable than others. This creates gaps in the historical record where specific combinations of points have simply never materialized.

A famous example occurred during Super Bowl XLVIII, when the Seattle Seahawks defeated the Denver Broncos 43–8. This was a scorigami because no prior NFL game had ever ended with that exact score. The concept also highlights the unique nature of American football compared to sports like soccer or hockey, where points are typically scored one at a time. In football, the complexity of extra-point attempts and defensive scores allows for a wider variety of unique outcomes. For instance, a score of 10–1 is considered one of the most unlikely scorigamis possible, requiring a specific sequence of a defensive point and two safeties.

The history of scorigami tracking reveals interesting coaching and cultural trends. Former Seahawks coach Pete Carroll was dubbed the 'wizard of modern Scorigami' because his team recorded exactly one scorigami per season from 2010 to 2018, winning every single one. Beyond the NFL, scorigamis appear in MLB, where the Atlanta Braves' 29–9 win in 2020 was the first such score in 21 years. In international soccer, England's 6–4 win against France in the 2026 FIFA World Cup third-place match was noted as a World Cup scorigami, marking a rare statistical anomaly in a sport usually defined by low-scoring margins.

Tracking these anomalies has become a niche digital subculture. A bot operated by Don Mattingly garnered over 500,000 followers by tracking NFL scorigamis from the term's inception until 2025. Meanwhile, college football offers an even broader range of scorigamis due to its longer history and older scoring systems. These include extreme outliers like a 222–0 game and various 1870s and 1880s scores that are mathematically impossible in the modern NFL, illustrating how the evolution of rules shapes the boundaries of what is possible on the field.

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