Methodology
and credits

Everything on this site is derived from public game records. This page says exactly what counts, what doesn't, and where it all comes from.

What a scorigami is

A scorigami is a game whose final score has never happened before in that league's history. The idea and the name come from Jon Bois, who invented it for the NFL, and the canonical fan site is nflscorigami.com. This site generalizes the idea: one grid per league, winner across, loser down, with era filters and combined views.

Jon Bois, who coined the term, walks through the original NFL scorigami.

Conventions

Scores are winner-loser, not home-away. Ties sit on the diagonal and count once per game. Overtime counts toward the final. The NHL's official convention adds one goal to a shootout winner's score, and that is what the grid shows. Forfeited and awarded games follow the official record and are flagged in the cell detail. Abandoned games with no official final are excluded.

Impossible versus never

A cell is marked impossible when no sequence of legal scoring plays can produce it under any ruleset the league has ever used. In the NFL that rules out exactly seven scores: 1-0, 1-1, 2-1, 3-1, 4-1, 5-1 and 7-1 (a lone point can only come from a one-point safety on a conversion try, which requires the opponent to have just scored a touchdown). College football's scoring rules leave nothing unreachable, because 19th-century rulesets scored touchdowns and safeties differently, and this site treats a cell as possible if it was ever possible.

The tie diagonal gets its own treatment, and there are three cases. Basketball is played until someone wins, so an NBA, WNBA or college game can never end level: the whole diagonal is impossible, and the hatched line down the middle of a basketball grid marks scores that literally cannot happen. Sports that once allowed ties but no longer can, like college football, MLB, the NHL, college baseball, minor league baseball and Olympic hockey, keep every tie that really happened on the diagonal, while tie scores that never occurred are marked impossible: those games cannot end level anymore, so a tie that has not happened by now never will. And where draws are still legal, in soccer, the NFL, Australian rules, NPB, the CFL and rugby, the whole diagonal stays live and any tie can still happen. Combined grids mark a cell impossible only when every selected league rules it out, which is why a combined NFL and college football grid has none: the NFL's seven impossible scores were all reachable under early college rules (1-1 actually happened), and every frozen college tie is still a legal NFL score.

Coverage by league

Exclusions

Cricket is out because innings-based scoring does not produce a comparable final-score pair. Golf, tennis and motorsport are out because there is no two-team score pair at all. Leagues beyond the launch set get added as reliable open data allows.

Data licensing and attribution

• FiveThirtyEight data: CC BY 4.0
• nflverse nfldata: MIT
• FootballDB.com data, non-commercial research use
• ESPN data: proprietary, research use
• Wikipedia text: CC BY-SA
• CollegeFootballData.com: free for non-commercial use, attribution
• NBA Stats: publicly accessible API, non-commercial use
• NBA/WNBA Stats: publicly accessible API, non-commercial use
• Wikipedia text: CC BY-SA 4.0
• hoopR data: MIT; underlying data from ESPN, non-commercial use
• wehoop data: ESPN-sourced public schedule data, non-commercial use
• The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at www.retrosheet.org.
• MLB Stats API: publicly accessible, non-commercial use
• Compiled from public NPB records, non-commercial use
• Boyd's World: community-compiled data, attributed, non-commercial use
• NHL Stats API: publicly accessible, non-commercial use
• Compiled from public Olympic records, non-commercial use
• engsoccerdata: GPL-3.0
• footballcsv: CC0-1.0
• openfootball: public domain (CC0)
• ASA: publicly served data, attribution, non-commercial use
• martj42 international results: CC0-1.0 (public domain)
• martj42 women's international results: CC0 (per author; repo has no LICENSE file)
• AFL data: community-compiled from afltables.com, non-commercial use
• International rugby union results 1871 to 2024, public GitHub dataset, non-commercial use

Every grid on this site is free. Nothing here is affiliated with any league. If a data source believes its terms are not being met, it will be fixed promptly.