Scorigami

Scorigami Board.svg scorigami board, as of the end of the 2023–24 NFL playoffs. The winning side's score is plotted left to right, the losing team's score top to bottom (ties correspond to the diagonal).

Black squares indicate scores that cannot occur, and green boxes indicate scores that have occurred at least once. White squares indicate scorelines that are possible but have never occurred and are therefore potential "scorigamis".|frame]]

In sports, a scorigami (a portmanteau of score and origami) is a scoring combination that has never happened before in a sport or league's history. The term was originated by sportswriter Jon Bois for American football scores in the National Football League (NFL) and is primarily used in this context.

Overview
The term was coined by SB Nation sportswriter Jon Bois in 2014 and most commonly refers to scores in American football, particularly in the National Football League (NFL). Bois charted all of the distinct scores in professional football since the inaugural season of the American Professional Football Association in 1920. Due to the unusual point values in football compared to other team sports, the distribution of the chart was irregular. Bois noted scorelines that could occur but had not yet done so, referring to the occurrence of a never before seen scoreline as "scorigami". As an example, the Seattle Seahawks' 43–8 win over the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII was scorigami, as no prior NFL game had ever finished 43–8. More recent scorigamis typically have high scores, with the winner often scoring over 50 points. However, there have been some low-scoring scorigamis such as the Eagles' 25–11 win over the Buccaneers in 2023. The most recent scorigami occurred on December 31, 2023, when the Baltimore Ravens defeated the Miami Dolphins 56–19.

A notable feature of the chart that Bois created was the highly unlikely possibility, not yet fulfilled, of a team ending a game with a single point due to the potential for the defense to score a conversion safety. This renders 1-point totals theoretically possible for the losing side against opposition scores of either exactly 6 or 8 or greater.

Since the term's inception, a Twitter bot has tracked scorigamis in the NFL. Bois and other media observers have noted the tendency of the Seattle Seahawks under head coach Pete Carroll to create scorigamis; Bois dubbed Carroll "the wizard of modern Scorigami, without question". From 2011 to 2018, the Seahawks had exactly one scorigami per season. Carroll himself has acknowledged his team's frequent scorigamis, joking to reporters after another game with a unique score, "That's ridiculous. I don't know how that happens. I'm thrilled that that happened again, for no reason. It's just something we've been working on in the offseason."

Scorigamis in other sports are occasionally noted. On September 9, 2020, Major League Baseball (MLB) had its first scorigami in 21 years, a 29–9 victory by the Atlanta Braves over the Miami Marlins—the previous scorigami for an MLB game had been a 24–12 win by the Cincinnati Reds over the Colorado Rockies on May 19, 1999. Additionally, scorigamis for the VFL/AFL (Australian rules football) are also tracked on Twitter.

The concept has also been extended to weather, with first-time occurrences of combinations of daily maximum and minimum temperatures at a location being termed "weathergami".