Fall of the House of Scorigami
Wins, losses and ties; these are the three possible outcomes of an NFL game. 20-17; that is the most common outcome of an NFL game. That final score has occurred 298 times, with the most recent coming in week 2 of the 2025 NFL season. 47-18— that score has happened 0 times in over 100 years and 15,000 games, which makes it scorigami.
Scorigami is a term invented by Jon Bois, who was writing for SB Nation at the time, in a 2014 article titled Chart Party: Exploring ‘scoragami,’ the art of inventing new final scores. With the origin of the term came the introduction of the scorigami chart, which lists the winning score on the top x-axis and the losing score on the right y-axis.
Every possible scenario is listed on the chart, with the highest score being 73— which is the highest number of points a team has scored in NFL history. Boxes marked green represent scores that have already occurred, boxes marked black are not possible final scores, and white boxes— well those are just scorigamis that haven’t happened yet.
This concept, unique final scores, is fairly unremarkable on its own. It used to happen and no one would notice or care, but since the launch of the scorigami bot on X, it’s not only noticed; it’s become a rooting interest for thousands of NFL fans everywhere.
The @NFL_Scorigami account has over 500,000 followers on X and it’s such a well-known idea that it was addressed by Pete Carroll, the current Las Vegas Raiders head coach , who has an astonishing 8 scorigamis under his belt. In 2018, while Carroll was still with the Seahawks, he joked that it was “something we’ve been working on in the offseason,” after a reporter brought up his prolific scorigami record.
The bot, created by Dave Mattingly, uses an algorithm that calculates the probability of a scorigami occurring and then tweets it out. If a game is 30-8, the bot will tweet that the game has a 90% chance of being scorigami, with the most likely scorigami score being 33-11. The replies will be filled with football fans and scorigami fans alike with a good chunk of them saying in this house we root for scorigami.
If you are familiar with the app formerly known as Twitter, you’ll know @CraigWeekend, which was a bot that tweeted out every Friday after work hours, a video of Daniel Craig saying, “Ladies and Gentlemen… The Weeknd” with an exasperated sense of relief. It seems innocuous, but for some people, it meant they had survived the week. The weekend was here and people rejoiced, celebrating the arrival of the weekend together in their own little corner of the internet.
That bot is now defunct and currently the scorigami bot faces that same fate. The trouble started in the first week of the 2025 NFL season, when the Ravens and Bills had a classic 41-40 matchup on Sunday Night Football and to top off the thrilling game, it was scorigami! The 1,092nd unique score in NFL history.
The scorigami fans waited and waited and… nothing. No tweet, no acknowledgement, no sign of anything being wrong— just silence. People speculated that maybe the guy who ran the bot was a Ravens fan and, so distraught by the nature of the loss, he had disabled the bot for this result. The first stage of grief: denial.
It is now week 6 and the scorigami bot has fully malfunctioned, listing fake scorigamis, calculating false odds and posting old scores. It’s over, and the people who rooted for scorigami and tracked it via this account will now have to do so on their own time, in their own way.
In a now viral Instagram post, user @jakemarsh18 pleaded, “We are now living in a world of misinformation, counterfeit celebrations, emotional instability… The people aren’t asking for much. Just accuracy, accountability and the occasional never-before-seen final score in NFL history. Restore dignity. Restore faith. Restore NFL Scorigami.”
Mattingly spoke to Front Office Sports about his bot’s malfunctions, saying, “This season, X has made some changes to their platform that have contributed to some of the recent problems.” He said he is trying to fix the issues, but the way X works now has limited some of the functionality for bot accounts operating on the free tier.
There is a scorigami bot that is active on Bluesky, the heavily sanitized but well-meaning replica of X that is less like a social media app and more like being in the deep end of a public pool with a life jacket on. That account was not created by Mattingly.
If you’re a millennial or older, you may remember the iBeer app or the champagne popping app or an app that functioned as a “virtual lighter.” These were quaint little novelty apps where you could look like you were drinking a beer when you tilted your phone screen or popped a fake bottle of champagne on New Year’s Eve. These were totally useless contrivances but they could have only been created in a very specific pocket of time.
The scorigami bot is a totally useless contrivance but much like iBeer, it could have only existed when it did. It could have only ever been created by a human mind. Sure, the technical elements and data researching could be accomplished —much faster, I’m sure— by machine learning bots, but to even consider people might be attracted to something so absurd requires the desire to escape the mundanity of everyday human experience.
The time of the wholesome, innocent Twitter bot is coming to an end. The bots now are designed with malicious intent, with a goal in mind, a directive. Scorigami served only one purpose, which was a ridiculous purpose. There is nothing it was trying to accomplish other than to keep score-igami.