The NFL has entered the Scorigami Era

This article is free. But if you’re an NFL nerd, I’d strongly encourage you to sign up for a paid subscription for full access to ELWAY and QBERT. They’re a lot of fun, especially as we’ve continued to add new charts and data. And fingers crossed, but so far ELWAY has also been ahead of schedule at keying in on the success of teams like the Seahawks and Patriots.

I’ve never exactly not been an NFL fan. When I was 15, I even ran the equivalent of a neighborhood football betting pool.1 It would have been nice if those Lions of my youth had given Barry Sanders more than one playoff win.

Because of the league’s ubiquity in American culture, though, the NFL is the background hum that pervades every sports fan’s life. You’re always hearing it, seeing it — at the bar, the airport, the poker room — without necessarily really listening to or watching it. But suddenly, because of ELWAY and QBERT, I’m an avid fan of the NFL again. As with visiting a city where you lived as a kid, there’s an uncanny familiarity — that pizza place is still open? — but you also notice all the little changes.

For instance, with a fresh set of eyes, it’s easier to see why the NFL remains such a popular product with the modern, episodic viewer2 even as other sports have struggled to hold their audience. But it’s also a much different league than my teenage archetype. Take, for instance, the proliferation of final scores that read like high school locker combinations. For example: 36-29. 44-26, 44-22 (twice!). And that was just last week alone. These are not the scores of our pastoral football childhoods: the familiar 28-24s, 20-17s, and 21-13s generated piously by some sensible linear combination of 7-point touchdowns and 3-point field goals.

Of those scores last week, only 36-29 was officially a Scorigami, the term invented by the sportswriter and humorist Jon Bois for the first appearance of a score in NFL history. That’s because Scorigamis are a nonrenewable resource. What were once vast, untapped deposits of Scorigamis have gradually been strip-mined away, particularly since the introduction