What Is A Scorigami In The NFL?

On any given Sunday, amazing feats of strength and agility are accomplished on the NFL gridiron. For the average person, it may seem incredible enough that the players take the hits they take and get up to continue playing. Even the casual football fan has likely heard about touchdowns and field goals, safeties, and punt returns. There is one less well-known football term that's come up in recent years: a Scorigami. But what exactly is a Scorigami?

Per the NFL Football Operations website, the final score in any NFL game is a combination of eights, sevens, sixes, threes, twos, and ones — the point values associated with all the different ways to score points in the game. Score a touchdown, for example, and that's six points. Allowed after a touchdown is what's called an extra point attempt, or the choice to kick the ball through the goalposts, tacking on one additional point for a total of seven. This is the most common way to score in the game, and those extra points are made so often, touchdowns are often assumed to be worth seven points. 

For this reason, the final score of an NFL game is often divisible by seven. It isn't always the case that those extra points are made, though, and there are many other scoring combinations that can occur, like when teams choose to try for two points after a six-point touchdown, leaving them with eight points on a scoring drive. All this creates the potential for some unusual number combinations in the final score of a game between the two teams, and when a combination happens for the first time ever, this is referred to as a Scorigami.

For example, in an early December game in the 2021 NFL football season, the Kansas City Chiefs faced the Las Vegas Raiders in a classic rivalry between two teams that have been at each other's throats since the '60s, according to Bleacher Report. The final score between the two teams was highly lopsided, with KC beating the Raiders 48 to 9. The last touchdown came when KC's running back Derrick Gore ran more than 50 yards with about seven minutes left in the game, per CBS Sports. The only touchdown scored by the Raiders came in the third quarter. Their point-after attempt after the touchdown failed, leaving six points tacked on to a three-point field goal score earlier, equaling a total of nine points (via CBS Sports).

Although it's likely little comfort to the Raiders after such a humiliating loss at the hands of their historic rival, that missed extra point allowed the very first game in the history of the NFL to end with a final score of 48 to 9. What's perhaps even more incredible, though, is that this was the fifth Scorigami in the 2021 NFL season. What's more, Scorigamis are overall down a bit from the 2020 season, when the league produced 12, according to CBS Sports. In total, as of this writing, there have been 1,071 Scorigamis in the history of the 102-year-old league. Most importantly, though, understanding a Scorigami adds a whole new level to the NFL game, even when your team is on the losing end of the matchup.