09-25-2019, 12:24 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-26-2019, 08:44 AM by Fordhammer.)
Like all good content creators on the Internet, Jon Bois is my hero. I first got into his Pretty Good series when I was looking for weird sports stuff to put on my radio station’s Facebook page. He's probably my favorite Twitter follow just from how weird it is, and nowadays his Chart Party videos are my heroin. If you don't know who Jon Bois is, first of all, welcome to the Internet, and second of all, here are some of his best videos, if you like good things, these are required viewing.
Welcome back. Anyway, perhaps his greatest contribution to the world of sports is coining the term "scorigami". A scorigami is a final score that has never happened before. I was watching his video on the subject for the twentieth time today, and it got me thinking, could scorigami work in the NSFL? I mean, the NFL has had more than 16,000 games in its history, and just doing some quick math (4 games per week for most of NSFL history X 14 weeks per season X 17 seasons so far + 3 playoff games over 17 seasons) nets us around 1,000 NSFL games in league history. So yeah, I think that's a big enough sample size to make a scorigami board out of. Let’s take every NSFL score and slap it on a scorigami board.
The Scorigami video
So, here we have our Scorigami board. If you’re wondering why half the board is blacked out, then clearly you haven’t been doing your Jon Bois homework, and if that happens again, it’ll be off to the principal’s office with you. But the short version is this, the row determines the winning team’s score, and the column determines the losing team’s score. If a box next to the blacked-out diagonal path is lit up, that’s a tie. As for that weird outcropping at the very top along the “1” row and column, it’s impossible to win a game by the score of 1-0, 1-1, 2-1, 3-1, 4-1, 5-1, and 7-1, but 6-1 is actually possible and you’ll have to watch the scorigami reference guide to find out how. The board stops at 76 points because that’s the most points any team has scored in a single game, but there’s no limit to how far this can go. So, with that out of the way, Year 1 of the NSFL looked like this:
Honestly, this is about what I expected. This looks like what would happen if you took all of the talent available at the time, and divided them up into six equal teams. We have a lot of scoring in the center of the board, as a result of both teams scoring between 10 and 24 points. By the way, the “1” in the red square indicates a scorigami that happened in Season 1. By the end of this exercise, this’ll be a multi-colored, multi-numbered rainbow. Now, if we look up at the top, we’ll see the parity of this early league even more clearly, as there were only two shutouts all season long. It was just really hard to blank a team back then. And there were also many unattainable scores like there are in the real game. Four and five are almost impossible to hit, as is eight and 11. 18 and 22 are also hard to achieve, as is 15, but that got hit once. But we did get at least one score that we may never see again.
See, the best thing for a scorigami is a safety. Those two-point buggers can turn any normal, conventional game into a weird scorigami waiting to happen. Week 4, Baltimore vs. Colorado. Baltimore’s entire team is in full-sync. Quarterback Scrub Kyubee threw for a pair of scores. Kicker Turk Turkleton hit three field goals (which also helps, the more field goals, the better). And not only did their defense score on a pick-six, they also picked up that all-important safety. In all, Baltimore scored 39 points that day, which is such as odd number for football scoring purposes, that even if that score happened today, it would likely be scorigami no matter what the other team scored. Colorado scored 24, and that’s a 39-24 scorigami.
Season 2:
There were actually more scorigami in Season 2 than Season 1. Fifty of them, in fact, compared to 37 last season. This comes from the fact that there were two more teams then there were last season. However, the other reason there were so many in Season 2 was that there was a slightly more pronounced difference between the good teams and the bad ones. This is why we’re seeing more blowout wins. There were four cases of a team scoring more than 40, as opposed to none in Season 1. And if you look to the right, you’ll see the most extreme example of that.
Week 10: Arizona vs. San Jose. Arizona was the class of the league in Season 2. They would end up going 12-2 and would easily win the Ultimus, and this was their finest hour. QB King Bronko would end up throwing six touchdowns, evenly splitting them between Mayran Jackson, Dustin Evans, and Charles Arthur Chess. Oddly enough, each of their scores happened in different quarters. Jackson caught two in the first quarter, Evans got two in the second, and Chess got his scores in the third. And just to add to the scoring bonanza, the Outlaw defense snagged three picks on the day, taking two for scores. But the cherry on top to make this a truly elusive score was a missed extra point. Though less impactful than a safety, these still help for making scorigami. So when the dust settled, the final score was 65-0, one of the biggest shutouts in NSFL history. And with 65 being so hard to hit, this is another one that may never happen again.
Season 3:
There are still plenty of openings on this board, so the number of scorigami in this season isn’t in danger of a huge drop. There were 49 this season, and while some surprisingly simple scores finally got made, like 20-17 or 17-14, some more tricky boxes were filled in. Season 3 will now forever be known as “The Year of the 32”, as a 32 appeared in the final score on five different occasions this season, despite having no appearances through the first two seasons. We also saw some teams reach a new level of superiority, as we saw six instances of a team scoring more than 45 points, which we only saw once in the first two years: the aforementioned 65-0 game. However, through three seasons, the very top left of the board is still completely white. There had yet to be a game in which the winner scored less than 13 points.
For the featured game of this season, let’s go to Week 3: Philadelphia vs. San Jose. After a first-quarter score by the Sabercats, the Liberty took over. They scored 21 unanswered and looked like they were in prime position to run away with it in the third. But then, Sabercat DT Dan Miller forced a fumble that led to a Sabercat field goal, 21-10. Then, Philly QB Clifford Rove threw a pick that led to a Sabercat touchdown. With the two-point conversion successful, it’s now 21-18. Then, another pick thrown by Rove led to a field goal for San Jose to tie it up. In the overtime period, both offenses struggled, only passing midfield once in their first five drives. But the Sabercats pulled it together in the final drive of overtime, going 80 yards in 12 plays to get to the Philadelphia 18 yard line with under 30 seconds to play… only for kicker Iyeh Blewitt to shank a 35-yard field goal. The game ended in the first tie in NSFL history, and obviously, a scorigami. Sad part is, it would’ve been a scorigami even if Blewitt made the field goal. Somehow, through three seasons, a 24-21 score still hadn’t been made. Odd.
Season 4:
We’re starting to see a decline in the number of scorigami present. Only 39 occurred this season and that can be attributed to the easy scores being already taken up. So much like the explorers of olden times, we’ve had to venture into uncharted territory to find new scorigami. For instance, we have our first game where the winner scored less than 13 points, a 12-10 win for the Wraiths over the Outlaws. We also can see a lot of action further down the board. This is a sign of losing teams scoring more points. On five different occasions in Season 4, a losing team scored 27 points or more, which only happened on five occasions through the first three seasons of the league. And the losing teams aren’t the only ones scoring a lot, obviously. The winners are more fruitful as well, putting up ten games of scoring at least 44 points, which again, matched the number of times it occurred in the first three seasons. But there is still some action in the middle of the board, including one that’s very visible as there’s nothing near it on all four sides.
Week 7, Hawks vs. Liberty. The action begins with a touchdown pass from Avon Blocksdale to Stormblessed, and the extra point is no good. The score is 6-0, and while that’s not too strange just yet, it’s a sign of things to come. From there, the scoring goes fairly normally, a couple of TDs and a field goal gives Philly 17 points, while Baltimore can only muster two more field goals. It’s 17-12 Liberty as we head into the fourth quarter. The 12 row is full of openings, so we’ve got a good shot here. But then, the Hawks score on a 54-yard punt return by Antoine Delacour, they go for two to try to go up by a field goal, but they fail. Baltimore leads 18-17, not a scorigami. But Philadelphia responds with an 80-yard drive of their own that ends in a touchdown pass to Paul DiMirio, and they go for two to go up by a touchdown. They succeed, and the game ends in a 25-18 scorigami. This is only the third game to have a 25 in the final score, and only the fifth have had an 18. And remember, through four seasons, that’s out of a sample size of over 200 games. That is an incredibly difficult score to achieve, and we’ll be lucky if we see it again.
Season 5:
We’re still getting plenty of scorigami in Season 5 (36 of them this year), but that’s because the right and bottom sides of the board, a space reserved for high-powered offenses, is seeing more action. That space I talked about in Season 1 where both teams scored between 10 and 24 points only saw three new scores: a 24-19, a 19-12, and shockingly a 21-14. Five seasons in. That’s weird. High-scoring shootouts are becoming the norm, as 12 games this season saw the loser score at least 26 points. Only 11 different scores happened with the loser scoring that much over the first four seasons of the league. Also, I need to change my verbiage from here on, as some scores that look like an instant scorigami have already happened. And since I haven’t tracked how many times a score happened, just that it’s happened at least once, I can’t say for certain if 11 games from the first four seasons had the loser score at least 26 or if maybe more did. The world may never know.
Our featured game this time is a doozy: Week 4, Arizona vs. Las Vegas. Oh yeah, Las Vegas once had an NSFL team. Neat. Anyway, Las Vegas sucked dicks this year. They went 1-13 and were a season away from getting shipped over to New Orleans to become the Second Line. Arizona, on the other hand, wasn’t the world-beater it was over the past few years, but they were still good enough to humble the Legion. Las Vegas scored first on a pick-six, but Arizona retaliated with two scores and never looked back. Las Vegas was able to make it close on a few different occasions, but Arizona would keep striking back. Las Vegas cut the lead to 14-13, and Arizona would score ten to end the first half, 24-13. Then a Legion field goal made it a one-score game. BAM, three straight King Bronko touchdowns, 45-16. How about 17 unanswered from the Legion to make it 45-33? One more touchdown by Arizona to put the nail in the coffin. Final score: 52-33. To this point, it’s the highest-scoring game in NSFL history and absolutely a scorigami.
Season 6:
This week, on Final Scores That Really Should’ve Been Scorigami By Now, we have 20-14, 24-21, 34-24, and 35-10. These are easy scores to hit, I don’t understand things. Scorigami is weird all of the time. Anyway, another modest decline down to 33 scorigami, and a lot of that comes from this one 7x8 box. In this box, the winner scored between 35 and 41 points, and the loser scored between 13 and 20 points. These are big, strong wins where one team just got shellacked. We’ve also got some more at the bottom as we’ve seen from the last couple of years. But two scores on the far right need to be talked about. This is the story of the Season 6 Colorado Yeti.
They sucked. They sucked really, really, really badly. These guys made the Season 16 Copperheads look like Ultimus contenders. In fact, at this point, they’ve sucked for a while now. They won three times in Season 3, once in Season 4, and twice in Season 5. But in Season 6, they would go winless. That’s the first time in league history that a team has gone 0-14. The second time a team would go 0-14 would come the following year when the Yeti would go winless AGAIN. So, no wins in two seasons, and just six wins in five years, big oof. Looking at their season-long stats, they were dead last in points scored and allowed, and yards earned and allowed, passing, rushing and total, except in rushing offense, where they were 1st in the league. Season 6 was probably Colorado’s worst season because their defense gave up the most points in a single game in league history (at the time), and then promptly gave up the second-most points in a single game in league history just seven weeks later.
Week 6: Colorado vs. Orange County. This was a war crime in sport form. The Otters offense just threw bombs all over the Yeti, and just seemed to score on them at will. Mike Boss threw for nearly 500 yards and eight touchdowns, the latter of which is a record that still stands to this day. Bradley Westfield caught three touchdowns and got a fourth one on a punt return. Jordan Yates caught 11 passes on the day and scored twice. And the defense held QB Nicholas Pierno to just 29 passing yards. Actually how? And Pierno gained 53 yards on the ground, but it took him 22 carries to get there, for an embarrassing 2.4 yards per carry, and he lost two fumbles just for good measure. The final score was a not-very-nice 69-17, and just in case you think the Yeti offense did literally anything, fear not, they didn’t. Those points came off a Vash Erikson pick-six, a Boss Tweed punt return score, and a field goal by a young rookie kicker named Micycle McCormick.
For most teams, that would be the lowlight of the season, but the Season 6 Yeti found new and exciting ways to suck that we haven’t seen before or since. Week 13: Colorado vs. Yellowknife. Yellowknife isn’t nearly as dominant of a team as Orange County was, but instead, every single player on this Wraiths team brought their A-game to this utter thrashing. Mat Akselsen had a strong day, throwing for 290 yards and three scores while rushing for 64 yards and two more scores. Eric Kennedy had 81 receiving yards and two rushing scores, odd statline, but why not? Dermot Lavelle Sr. notched a punt return score, and Philippe Carter ran a pick back for six. Nicholas Pierno saw a huge improvement and threw for 123 yards and two picks. Couple more rounds of improvements like that and we might see a touchdown out of him someday. Once again, the best player on this Yeti team was their young rookie Micycle McCormick, who kicked two long field goals, including one from 56 yards. The final score was an unholy 66-6 (in Season 6 no less, this team is damned). Scorigami.
Season 7:
Another modest decline down to 31 scorigami, but now most of the easy spots are filled. If you want a scorigami, you’ve gotta work for it. Either score an ungodly amount of touchdowns or field goals, miss an extra point or score a safety. There isn’t an easily discernable pattern for this season. They just kind of appear wherever they can. We got some action on the bottom right for high-scoring games and a couple of 50-point blowouts. And there’s a lot of games at the top of the board, where a losing team scored single digits. This includes the first game in NSFL history to end with a team scoring exactly five points.
Week 14: Baltimore vs. Colorado. Oh hey, look. It’s our old friends, the Yeti. Last season, I mentioned how their defense was terribad. Well, Season 7’s offense would like a word. This team had a whopping five first-round picks (out of eight total). Unfortunately, the other three first-rounders were Verso L’Alto, Vlad Fyodorovich, and Mason Brown. Oh dear. The players did get were Howard Miller (great), Ryan Applehort (alright), and three other players who weren’t that good. But despite getting two new pieces for their offense, that unit was disgustingly bad. They averaged less than 10 points per game, which I didn’t even think was possible.
Anyway, back on point, Baltimore vs. Colorado. If you were one of the six Yeti fans left by this point, then you could probably handle this, because you were used to this kind of ineptitude. On Baltimore’s first three drives of the game, they got a field goal and two touchdowns to take an early 17-0 lead. But on the fourth drive, Avon Blocksdale was sacked by Dental Dam for a safety, it’s 17-2. Baltimore tacked on a touchdown in the third, followed by a Colorado field goal, 24-5 Baltimore. After that, as you might expect, the Colorado offense couldn’t get anything going, and their defense gave up 24 more points in the fourth to give us the delightfully bizarre final score of 48-5.
Season 8:
I thought this would be the year when the big dropoff would finally happen, but as I started tracking these, all four Week 1 games were scorigami, and I knew that wouldn’t be the case. In all, 35 scorigami occurred, the most since Season 5. I was wondering what caused the jump. There were only three safeties all season, so not that. Extra point percentage didn’t seem to go down that much. But there was quite a bit of offense. We didn’t see too many extreme single-game scoring binges, but a lot of the action on the board is showing up to the right of that original 10-24 block. The majority of these scores are winding up with the winner scoring somewhere in the mid-30s to low-40s. Oh, and we even got a scorigami in the Ultimus. This wasn’t the first time it’s happened, and it won’t be the last, but we got one with a final score of… 24-13? Um… ok.
So for the last few featured games, we’ve looked at extreme scores, like 48-5 or 66-6. Let’s look for something that would take a little more finesse to hit. Something kind of close with a couple of weird scores to make it interesting. Week 8: Philadelphia vs. Arizona. The scoring starts fast and often as Arizona takes a 24-10 lead into halftime. To start the third, Reg Mackworthy scores for the Outlaws, but they miss the extra point. 30-10, we have a chance. Philadelphia responses with a touchdown of their own, and after an Outlaw field goal, the Liberty score another touchdown. Before the extra point, it’s 33-23, so they go for two to bring it within a single score, and they succeed. 33-25, this would be a scorigami. Now, Philly needs a stop and they get one, but that drive goes nowhere and they have to punt it back. Arizona has the ball again, and Philly needs to force a punt to preserve any hope of a win, but it doesn’t happen. The Outlaws kill all of the clock and score the dagger touchdown with 15 seconds left. The final score is 40-25 and that’s a scorigami.
Season 9:
We’re back in a decline again, as we’re down to 27 scorigami, but it honestly felt like less as I was counting through them. We have found an area that has been pretty easy to find spots in for this season, right along the top. Out of the 27 scorigami from this season, 15 of them (more than half of them) saw the loser score 10 points or fewer. A lot of the rest of the blips come from the bottom right, where the winner scored more than 30 and the loser scored more than 20. Between these two areas and the rest of the stragglers, we've completely left the 10-24 zone.
Now for the featured score for this season, let’s start by telling you the final score right away: 21-7. Doesn’t seem that interesting at first glance? Well, you’ll see. Week 12: Colorado vs. Philadelphia. We begin with a safety by Philadelphia. Philadelphia will be the team that ends up scoring seven points, and they just scored a safety. How is that possible? Well, after that safety, Colorado responded with a touchdown. Philadelphia responded with another safety. The score is now 7-4. We’ve reached uncharted waters. Never mind the NSFL, even the NFL, which has played 16 times more games than the NSFL, has only seen one game where a team scored exactly four points. For the sake of history, Philadelphia needs to buckle down and just stop scoring any kind of points. Unfortunately, after a Colorado TD, Philly does the worst thing imaginable: they score a field goal, bringing the score to a boring, old 14-7. Colorado puts one more score on the board, and the game ends 21-7, and unbelievably, that’s scorigami. You can not imagine how excited I was that that was the case and that we didn’t lose this game to the sands of time because Philly’s kicker just had to play hero-ball. Also, Yeti DT Dan Miller had a record nine sacks in this game, because fucking science or whatever.
Doing scorigami is hard, and I wanna cash in on that money multiplier in some way, so we're splitting this into two parts. Next time, we'll go to the present day and see what's left for the future. Also, here's a link to all of the scorigami boards to date, I'll update them with the other seasons as I make them.
4100 words .
Welcome back. Anyway, perhaps his greatest contribution to the world of sports is coining the term "scorigami". A scorigami is a final score that has never happened before. I was watching his video on the subject for the twentieth time today, and it got me thinking, could scorigami work in the NSFL? I mean, the NFL has had more than 16,000 games in its history, and just doing some quick math (4 games per week for most of NSFL history X 14 weeks per season X 17 seasons so far + 3 playoff games over 17 seasons) nets us around 1,000 NSFL games in league history. So yeah, I think that's a big enough sample size to make a scorigami board out of. Let’s take every NSFL score and slap it on a scorigami board.
The Scorigami video
So, here we have our Scorigami board. If you’re wondering why half the board is blacked out, then clearly you haven’t been doing your Jon Bois homework, and if that happens again, it’ll be off to the principal’s office with you. But the short version is this, the row determines the winning team’s score, and the column determines the losing team’s score. If a box next to the blacked-out diagonal path is lit up, that’s a tie. As for that weird outcropping at the very top along the “1” row and column, it’s impossible to win a game by the score of 1-0, 1-1, 2-1, 3-1, 4-1, 5-1, and 7-1, but 6-1 is actually possible and you’ll have to watch the scorigami reference guide to find out how. The board stops at 76 points because that’s the most points any team has scored in a single game, but there’s no limit to how far this can go. So, with that out of the way, Year 1 of the NSFL looked like this:
Honestly, this is about what I expected. This looks like what would happen if you took all of the talent available at the time, and divided them up into six equal teams. We have a lot of scoring in the center of the board, as a result of both teams scoring between 10 and 24 points. By the way, the “1” in the red square indicates a scorigami that happened in Season 1. By the end of this exercise, this’ll be a multi-colored, multi-numbered rainbow. Now, if we look up at the top, we’ll see the parity of this early league even more clearly, as there were only two shutouts all season long. It was just really hard to blank a team back then. And there were also many unattainable scores like there are in the real game. Four and five are almost impossible to hit, as is eight and 11. 18 and 22 are also hard to achieve, as is 15, but that got hit once. But we did get at least one score that we may never see again.
See, the best thing for a scorigami is a safety. Those two-point buggers can turn any normal, conventional game into a weird scorigami waiting to happen. Week 4, Baltimore vs. Colorado. Baltimore’s entire team is in full-sync. Quarterback Scrub Kyubee threw for a pair of scores. Kicker Turk Turkleton hit three field goals (which also helps, the more field goals, the better). And not only did their defense score on a pick-six, they also picked up that all-important safety. In all, Baltimore scored 39 points that day, which is such as odd number for football scoring purposes, that even if that score happened today, it would likely be scorigami no matter what the other team scored. Colorado scored 24, and that’s a 39-24 scorigami.
Season 2:
There were actually more scorigami in Season 2 than Season 1. Fifty of them, in fact, compared to 37 last season. This comes from the fact that there were two more teams then there were last season. However, the other reason there were so many in Season 2 was that there was a slightly more pronounced difference between the good teams and the bad ones. This is why we’re seeing more blowout wins. There were four cases of a team scoring more than 40, as opposed to none in Season 1. And if you look to the right, you’ll see the most extreme example of that.
Week 10: Arizona vs. San Jose. Arizona was the class of the league in Season 2. They would end up going 12-2 and would easily win the Ultimus, and this was their finest hour. QB King Bronko would end up throwing six touchdowns, evenly splitting them between Mayran Jackson, Dustin Evans, and Charles Arthur Chess. Oddly enough, each of their scores happened in different quarters. Jackson caught two in the first quarter, Evans got two in the second, and Chess got his scores in the third. And just to add to the scoring bonanza, the Outlaw defense snagged three picks on the day, taking two for scores. But the cherry on top to make this a truly elusive score was a missed extra point. Though less impactful than a safety, these still help for making scorigami. So when the dust settled, the final score was 65-0, one of the biggest shutouts in NSFL history. And with 65 being so hard to hit, this is another one that may never happen again.
Season 3:
There are still plenty of openings on this board, so the number of scorigami in this season isn’t in danger of a huge drop. There were 49 this season, and while some surprisingly simple scores finally got made, like 20-17 or 17-14, some more tricky boxes were filled in. Season 3 will now forever be known as “The Year of the 32”, as a 32 appeared in the final score on five different occasions this season, despite having no appearances through the first two seasons. We also saw some teams reach a new level of superiority, as we saw six instances of a team scoring more than 45 points, which we only saw once in the first two years: the aforementioned 65-0 game. However, through three seasons, the very top left of the board is still completely white. There had yet to be a game in which the winner scored less than 13 points.
For the featured game of this season, let’s go to Week 3: Philadelphia vs. San Jose. After a first-quarter score by the Sabercats, the Liberty took over. They scored 21 unanswered and looked like they were in prime position to run away with it in the third. But then, Sabercat DT Dan Miller forced a fumble that led to a Sabercat field goal, 21-10. Then, Philly QB Clifford Rove threw a pick that led to a Sabercat touchdown. With the two-point conversion successful, it’s now 21-18. Then, another pick thrown by Rove led to a field goal for San Jose to tie it up. In the overtime period, both offenses struggled, only passing midfield once in their first five drives. But the Sabercats pulled it together in the final drive of overtime, going 80 yards in 12 plays to get to the Philadelphia 18 yard line with under 30 seconds to play… only for kicker Iyeh Blewitt to shank a 35-yard field goal. The game ended in the first tie in NSFL history, and obviously, a scorigami. Sad part is, it would’ve been a scorigami even if Blewitt made the field goal. Somehow, through three seasons, a 24-21 score still hadn’t been made. Odd.
Season 4:
We’re starting to see a decline in the number of scorigami present. Only 39 occurred this season and that can be attributed to the easy scores being already taken up. So much like the explorers of olden times, we’ve had to venture into uncharted territory to find new scorigami. For instance, we have our first game where the winner scored less than 13 points, a 12-10 win for the Wraiths over the Outlaws. We also can see a lot of action further down the board. This is a sign of losing teams scoring more points. On five different occasions in Season 4, a losing team scored 27 points or more, which only happened on five occasions through the first three seasons of the league. And the losing teams aren’t the only ones scoring a lot, obviously. The winners are more fruitful as well, putting up ten games of scoring at least 44 points, which again, matched the number of times it occurred in the first three seasons. But there is still some action in the middle of the board, including one that’s very visible as there’s nothing near it on all four sides.
Week 7, Hawks vs. Liberty. The action begins with a touchdown pass from Avon Blocksdale to Stormblessed, and the extra point is no good. The score is 6-0, and while that’s not too strange just yet, it’s a sign of things to come. From there, the scoring goes fairly normally, a couple of TDs and a field goal gives Philly 17 points, while Baltimore can only muster two more field goals. It’s 17-12 Liberty as we head into the fourth quarter. The 12 row is full of openings, so we’ve got a good shot here. But then, the Hawks score on a 54-yard punt return by Antoine Delacour, they go for two to try to go up by a field goal, but they fail. Baltimore leads 18-17, not a scorigami. But Philadelphia responds with an 80-yard drive of their own that ends in a touchdown pass to Paul DiMirio, and they go for two to go up by a touchdown. They succeed, and the game ends in a 25-18 scorigami. This is only the third game to have a 25 in the final score, and only the fifth have had an 18. And remember, through four seasons, that’s out of a sample size of over 200 games. That is an incredibly difficult score to achieve, and we’ll be lucky if we see it again.
Season 5:
We’re still getting plenty of scorigami in Season 5 (36 of them this year), but that’s because the right and bottom sides of the board, a space reserved for high-powered offenses, is seeing more action. That space I talked about in Season 1 where both teams scored between 10 and 24 points only saw three new scores: a 24-19, a 19-12, and shockingly a 21-14. Five seasons in. That’s weird. High-scoring shootouts are becoming the norm, as 12 games this season saw the loser score at least 26 points. Only 11 different scores happened with the loser scoring that much over the first four seasons of the league. Also, I need to change my verbiage from here on, as some scores that look like an instant scorigami have already happened. And since I haven’t tracked how many times a score happened, just that it’s happened at least once, I can’t say for certain if 11 games from the first four seasons had the loser score at least 26 or if maybe more did. The world may never know.
Our featured game this time is a doozy: Week 4, Arizona vs. Las Vegas. Oh yeah, Las Vegas once had an NSFL team. Neat. Anyway, Las Vegas sucked dicks this year. They went 1-13 and were a season away from getting shipped over to New Orleans to become the Second Line. Arizona, on the other hand, wasn’t the world-beater it was over the past few years, but they were still good enough to humble the Legion. Las Vegas scored first on a pick-six, but Arizona retaliated with two scores and never looked back. Las Vegas was able to make it close on a few different occasions, but Arizona would keep striking back. Las Vegas cut the lead to 14-13, and Arizona would score ten to end the first half, 24-13. Then a Legion field goal made it a one-score game. BAM, three straight King Bronko touchdowns, 45-16. How about 17 unanswered from the Legion to make it 45-33? One more touchdown by Arizona to put the nail in the coffin. Final score: 52-33. To this point, it’s the highest-scoring game in NSFL history and absolutely a scorigami.
Season 6:
This week, on Final Scores That Really Should’ve Been Scorigami By Now, we have 20-14, 24-21, 34-24, and 35-10. These are easy scores to hit, I don’t understand things. Scorigami is weird all of the time. Anyway, another modest decline down to 33 scorigami, and a lot of that comes from this one 7x8 box. In this box, the winner scored between 35 and 41 points, and the loser scored between 13 and 20 points. These are big, strong wins where one team just got shellacked. We’ve also got some more at the bottom as we’ve seen from the last couple of years. But two scores on the far right need to be talked about. This is the story of the Season 6 Colorado Yeti.
They sucked. They sucked really, really, really badly. These guys made the Season 16 Copperheads look like Ultimus contenders. In fact, at this point, they’ve sucked for a while now. They won three times in Season 3, once in Season 4, and twice in Season 5. But in Season 6, they would go winless. That’s the first time in league history that a team has gone 0-14. The second time a team would go 0-14 would come the following year when the Yeti would go winless AGAIN. So, no wins in two seasons, and just six wins in five years, big oof. Looking at their season-long stats, they were dead last in points scored and allowed, and yards earned and allowed, passing, rushing and total, except in rushing offense, where they were 1st in the league. Season 6 was probably Colorado’s worst season because their defense gave up the most points in a single game in league history (at the time), and then promptly gave up the second-most points in a single game in league history just seven weeks later.
Week 6: Colorado vs. Orange County. This was a war crime in sport form. The Otters offense just threw bombs all over the Yeti, and just seemed to score on them at will. Mike Boss threw for nearly 500 yards and eight touchdowns, the latter of which is a record that still stands to this day. Bradley Westfield caught three touchdowns and got a fourth one on a punt return. Jordan Yates caught 11 passes on the day and scored twice. And the defense held QB Nicholas Pierno to just 29 passing yards. Actually how? And Pierno gained 53 yards on the ground, but it took him 22 carries to get there, for an embarrassing 2.4 yards per carry, and he lost two fumbles just for good measure. The final score was a not-very-nice 69-17, and just in case you think the Yeti offense did literally anything, fear not, they didn’t. Those points came off a Vash Erikson pick-six, a Boss Tweed punt return score, and a field goal by a young rookie kicker named Micycle McCormick.
For most teams, that would be the lowlight of the season, but the Season 6 Yeti found new and exciting ways to suck that we haven’t seen before or since. Week 13: Colorado vs. Yellowknife. Yellowknife isn’t nearly as dominant of a team as Orange County was, but instead, every single player on this Wraiths team brought their A-game to this utter thrashing. Mat Akselsen had a strong day, throwing for 290 yards and three scores while rushing for 64 yards and two more scores. Eric Kennedy had 81 receiving yards and two rushing scores, odd statline, but why not? Dermot Lavelle Sr. notched a punt return score, and Philippe Carter ran a pick back for six. Nicholas Pierno saw a huge improvement and threw for 123 yards and two picks. Couple more rounds of improvements like that and we might see a touchdown out of him someday. Once again, the best player on this Yeti team was their young rookie Micycle McCormick, who kicked two long field goals, including one from 56 yards. The final score was an unholy 66-6 (in Season 6 no less, this team is damned). Scorigami.
Season 7:
Another modest decline down to 31 scorigami, but now most of the easy spots are filled. If you want a scorigami, you’ve gotta work for it. Either score an ungodly amount of touchdowns or field goals, miss an extra point or score a safety. There isn’t an easily discernable pattern for this season. They just kind of appear wherever they can. We got some action on the bottom right for high-scoring games and a couple of 50-point blowouts. And there’s a lot of games at the top of the board, where a losing team scored single digits. This includes the first game in NSFL history to end with a team scoring exactly five points.
Week 14: Baltimore vs. Colorado. Oh hey, look. It’s our old friends, the Yeti. Last season, I mentioned how their defense was terribad. Well, Season 7’s offense would like a word. This team had a whopping five first-round picks (out of eight total). Unfortunately, the other three first-rounders were Verso L’Alto, Vlad Fyodorovich, and Mason Brown. Oh dear. The players did get were Howard Miller (great), Ryan Applehort (alright), and three other players who weren’t that good. But despite getting two new pieces for their offense, that unit was disgustingly bad. They averaged less than 10 points per game, which I didn’t even think was possible.
Anyway, back on point, Baltimore vs. Colorado. If you were one of the six Yeti fans left by this point, then you could probably handle this, because you were used to this kind of ineptitude. On Baltimore’s first three drives of the game, they got a field goal and two touchdowns to take an early 17-0 lead. But on the fourth drive, Avon Blocksdale was sacked by Dental Dam for a safety, it’s 17-2. Baltimore tacked on a touchdown in the third, followed by a Colorado field goal, 24-5 Baltimore. After that, as you might expect, the Colorado offense couldn’t get anything going, and their defense gave up 24 more points in the fourth to give us the delightfully bizarre final score of 48-5.
Season 8:
I thought this would be the year when the big dropoff would finally happen, but as I started tracking these, all four Week 1 games were scorigami, and I knew that wouldn’t be the case. In all, 35 scorigami occurred, the most since Season 5. I was wondering what caused the jump. There were only three safeties all season, so not that. Extra point percentage didn’t seem to go down that much. But there was quite a bit of offense. We didn’t see too many extreme single-game scoring binges, but a lot of the action on the board is showing up to the right of that original 10-24 block. The majority of these scores are winding up with the winner scoring somewhere in the mid-30s to low-40s. Oh, and we even got a scorigami in the Ultimus. This wasn’t the first time it’s happened, and it won’t be the last, but we got one with a final score of… 24-13? Um… ok.
So for the last few featured games, we’ve looked at extreme scores, like 48-5 or 66-6. Let’s look for something that would take a little more finesse to hit. Something kind of close with a couple of weird scores to make it interesting. Week 8: Philadelphia vs. Arizona. The scoring starts fast and often as Arizona takes a 24-10 lead into halftime. To start the third, Reg Mackworthy scores for the Outlaws, but they miss the extra point. 30-10, we have a chance. Philadelphia responses with a touchdown of their own, and after an Outlaw field goal, the Liberty score another touchdown. Before the extra point, it’s 33-23, so they go for two to bring it within a single score, and they succeed. 33-25, this would be a scorigami. Now, Philly needs a stop and they get one, but that drive goes nowhere and they have to punt it back. Arizona has the ball again, and Philly needs to force a punt to preserve any hope of a win, but it doesn’t happen. The Outlaws kill all of the clock and score the dagger touchdown with 15 seconds left. The final score is 40-25 and that’s a scorigami.
Season 9:
We’re back in a decline again, as we’re down to 27 scorigami, but it honestly felt like less as I was counting through them. We have found an area that has been pretty easy to find spots in for this season, right along the top. Out of the 27 scorigami from this season, 15 of them (more than half of them) saw the loser score 10 points or fewer. A lot of the rest of the blips come from the bottom right, where the winner scored more than 30 and the loser scored more than 20. Between these two areas and the rest of the stragglers, we've completely left the 10-24 zone.
Now for the featured score for this season, let’s start by telling you the final score right away: 21-7. Doesn’t seem that interesting at first glance? Well, you’ll see. Week 12: Colorado vs. Philadelphia. We begin with a safety by Philadelphia. Philadelphia will be the team that ends up scoring seven points, and they just scored a safety. How is that possible? Well, after that safety, Colorado responded with a touchdown. Philadelphia responded with another safety. The score is now 7-4. We’ve reached uncharted waters. Never mind the NSFL, even the NFL, which has played 16 times more games than the NSFL, has only seen one game where a team scored exactly four points. For the sake of history, Philadelphia needs to buckle down and just stop scoring any kind of points. Unfortunately, after a Colorado TD, Philly does the worst thing imaginable: they score a field goal, bringing the score to a boring, old 14-7. Colorado puts one more score on the board, and the game ends 21-7, and unbelievably, that’s scorigami. You can not imagine how excited I was that that was the case and that we didn’t lose this game to the sands of time because Philly’s kicker just had to play hero-ball. Also, Yeti DT Dan Miller had a record nine sacks in this game, because fucking science or whatever.
Doing scorigami is hard, and I wanna cash in on that money multiplier in some way, so we're splitting this into two parts. Next time, we'll go to the present day and see what's left for the future. Also, here's a link to all of the scorigami boards to date, I'll update them with the other seasons as I make them.
4100 words .