This is one of those things that NFL fans on social media go absolutely nuts about and if you are not in on it the whole thing can seem pretty confusing.
We had to look it up ourselves the first time we saw everyone tweeting about it during a random Week 14 game a few years back.
Here is what it means.
The basic idea
A guy called Jon Bois who makes really good sports content on YouTube came up with the term scorigami back in 2016.
The concept is dead simple.
The NFL has been around since 1920 and every game that has ever been played has a final score attached to it. All of those scores are recorded.
A scorigami happens when a game finishes with a final score that has never happened before in the history of the league.
First time ever.
That is it.
So if a game finishes 20-17 that is not scorigami because that score has happened hundreds of times over the years.
But if a game finishes something like 28-6 and that specific combination has never come up in over a hundred years of NFL football, then congratulations, you just witnessed a scorigami and Twitter is about to let you know about it.
What makes football different
You do not really see the scorigami concept applied to basketball or baseball and the reason is that those sports have pretty straightforward scoring.
One basket, two points or three points.
One run, one run.
Football is all over the place by comparison.
A touchdown is 6 but then you can add 1 or 2 after it. A field goal is 3. A safety is 2. And you can only score 1 point in very specific circumstances that almost never actually happen in a real game.
All of those different combinations stacked on top of each other across four quarters means there are final scores out there that have simply never occurred despite the NFL playing tens of thousands of games since the 1920s.
Jon Bois tracks all of this on a grid where every possible score combination has its own square. The ones that have happened before are filled in and the ones that have not are blank.
There are still a lot more blank squares than most people would expect which is why scorigami keeps happening multiple times every season and why NFL Twitter treats each one like a national holiday.
Can you actually bet on it?
Some sportsbooks put up a scorigami market for bigger NFL games, especially during the playoffs and the Super Bowl. It is usually just a yes or no prop.
Will this game produce a scorigami? Yes typically pays somewhere around +400 to +600 depending on the matchup.
The books know it does not happen every week but it comes up often enough that the price is not completely outrageous.
If you do bet on scorigami you basically spend the entire fourth quarter hoping for safeties, missed extra points, and two point conversion attempts.
The weirder the game gets the better your chances.
It is a fun sweat!
