Chart Party: Scorigami, or the story of every NFL final score that has ever happened

Scorigami is a word I made up. It is the art of achieving a final score in an NFL game that has never happened before. As you might expect, this is pretty difficult to do, but it happened five times in 2016, the year in which I first published this story:

• 48-33 (Falcons over Panthers)
• 41-25 (Patriots over Bills)
• 46-27 (Panthers over 49ers)
• 49-15 (Panthers over Cardinals)
• 45-32 (Falcons over Saints)

But as we stumble further into history, we run into scores like 0-0, 2-0, and 10-4. The history of scorigami is long and strange, and offers plenty of excuses to tell some of the NFL’s all-time weirdest stories, so that’s what I did in this episode. I also took a look at scores like 6-1 that, while technically possible, will surely never happen.

I dragged massive volumes of crusty old statistics out of the dirt while researching this video, and I tried to double-check those, and my calculations of them, as well as I could. Still, it’s entirely possible that I got something wrong. If you think I did, please yell at me in the comments or on Twitter at @jon_bois.

Once again, I relied so heavily on Pro-Football-Reference that I don’t know what I would have done without it. Their Play Index is a ton of fun, and you might also want to check out their list of every final score that has ever happened.

In this episode I referenced the “222-0” episode of Pretty Good, which is what it sounds like. That is here.

This is the third full-length episode of Chart Party. In the first episode, I re-scored the entire 2015-16 NBA season without the three-point line and found out who won.

In the second episode, I examined the profoundly odd career of Jeff Francoeur, my favorite worst baseball player.

Here is the full Scorigami board, accurate as of December 10th, 2016:

And here are a few charts from the episode, in the event you have 20 seconds to spare but not 20 minutes:

Previously on Secret Base:

• The 1986 Philadelphia Eagles were sacked into utter oblivion
• NFL teams that score 16 points win more often than teas that score 21 points. Wait, what?
• Nori Aoki went a whole MLB season without seeing the bases loaded. Here’s how unlikely that was.
• Video: The History of the Seattle Mariners