Final-score digit frequencies
Start with the single digits. Across 8,968 team-scores from 4,484 games (one of the 4,485 games has no final-score record in the data), here is how often each last digit appeared at the final whistle, with overtime included.
| Last digit | Share of team-scores |
|---|---|
| 0 | 16.82% |
| 1 | 9.32% |
| 2 | 4.74% |
| 3 | 12.85% |
| 4 | 13.58% |
| 5 | 4.55% |
| 6 | 9.22% |
| 7 | 16.26% |
| 8 | 6.49% |
| 9 | 6.18% |
Zero and seven are nearly tied at the top, three and four follow, and the remaining digits trail by a wide margin. A square is a pair of digits, though, so the more useful table is the joint one below.
The top 10 final digit pairs
Each game contributes one pair: the home team's last digit and the away team's last digit. The share is the percentage of all games that landed on that pair. If you assign one team to the rows and the other to the columns, these are the most common winning pairs for the final prize.
| Rank | Home digit | Away digit | Games | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7 | 0 | 158 | 3.52% |
| 2 | 0 | 7 | 150 | 3.35% |
| 3 | 0 | 3 | 141 | 3.14% |
| 4 | 7 | 4 | 138 | 3.08% |
| 5 | 3 | 0 | 137 | 3.06% |
| 6 | 4 | 7 | 135 | 3.01% |
| 7 | 3 | 7 | 114 | 2.54% |
| 8 | 4 | 0 | 105 | 2.34% |
| 9 | 0 | 4 | 103 | 2.30% |
| 10 | 6 | 0 | 93 | 2.07% |
The best pair, 7-0, came up in 3.52 percent of games. On a 100-square board with a 40 percent final prize, that is roughly 1.4 percent of the pot in expected final payout, against about 0.16 percent for a pair that comes up 0.4 percent of the time. The advantage is real, but it only matters if you can choose a square after the digits are known.
The bottom 10 final digit pairs
The cold pairs are just as instructive. These are the ten least frequent final combinations in the same 4,484 games with final scores.
| Rank | Home digit | Away digit | Games | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 0.07% |
| 2 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 0.13% |
| 3 | 9 | 8 | 9 | 0.20% |
| 4 | 5 | 2 | 10 | 0.22% |
| 5 | 8 | 8 | 11 | 0.25% |
| 6 | 5 | 9 | 12 | 0.27% |
| 7 | 9 | 5 | 12 | 0.27% |
| 8 | 2 | 5 | 14 | 0.31% |
| 9 | 8 | 9 | 15 | 0.33% |
| 10 | 1 | 2 | 16 | 0.36% |
Three pairs — 1-2, 3-2 and 8-2 — are tied at 16 games apiece, so the last row is one of three. At the bottom, 2-2 appeared three times in 4,484 games. A fair draw can still hand that square to someone; it just rarely wins.
Why 0, 7, 3 and 4 dominate
Football scoring is built from a small set of increments. A touchdown plus extra point is 7. A field goal is 3. A safety is 2, and a missed extra point leaves a touchdown worth 6. Add those numbers in different orders and the last digit clusters around a few values.
Seven is the cleanest: one touchdown and a good extra point. Three is one field goal. Zero appears whenever a team reaches a round number such as 10 (7+3), 20 (7+7+3+3) or 30, and also when a quarter ends scoreless. Four is usually two touchdowns (14) or a combination such as 24 and 34. Once a team has scored a few times, those four digits cover most of the realistic totals.
The rare digits need awkward combinations. A 5 might require 15 points from five field goals, or a mix such as 7+3+3+2. A 2 often needs a safety or a very specific sequence. A 9 can come from three field goals, a 6+3 combination, or a touchdown plus a safety. Those outcomes happen, but they are not how most drives end, which is why 2, 5 and 9 sit near the bottom of the table.
Quarter by quarter: Q1 is a different game
The digit mix changes as the game goes on. Early scores are low and concentrated; late scores have more combinations to land on. Combined percentages for all team-scores:
| Digit | End of Q1 | Halftime | End of Q3 | Final |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 42.06% | 26.31% | 21.07% | 16.82% |
| 1 | 0.49% | 5.12% | 7.50% | 9.32% |
| 2 | 0.42% | 1.28% | 2.53% | 4.74% |
| 3 | 19.44% | 18.43% | 15.95% | 12.85% |
| 4 | 5.66% | 12.66% | 13.89% | 13.58% |
| 5 | 0.12% | 0.96% | 2.15% | 4.55% |
| 6 | 3.33% | 8.87% | 9.19% | 9.22% |
| 7 | 27.84% | 21.83% | 19.50% | 16.26% |
| 8 | 0.19% | 1.47% | 4.09% | 6.49% |
| 9 | 0.43% | 3.07% | 4.12% | 6.18% |
At the end of the first quarter, 0, 3 and 7 account for 89.3 percent of all team-scores. Zero alone is 42 percent, because plenty of teams have not scored yet. By the final whistle the top three have fallen to 45.9 percent, and the middle digits have absorbed the difference. That is why a first-quarter prize often lands on a 0 or 7 square, while the final prize is more spread out.
Super Bowl history
The regular-season tables above are a baseline, not a script for the big game. Super Bowl scoring has its own history, and the Super Bowl squares results page lists the quarter-by-quarter scores and winning digit pairs for every game. For period-by-period probabilities from the full 2010–2026 NFL sample, see football squares odds by quarter. Use both as context, not as a prediction: in a fair pool the digits are still drawn after the board fills, so no historical table lets you choose a winning square in advance.
What this means for your board
In a standard pool, every square has the same chance before the numbers are drawn. You cannot pick the digits, so the table does not give you a strategy for a fair draw. What it does give you is context: if someone asks why the 7-0 square keeps winning, you can show them the frequency and explain the touchdown-plus-PAT math.
It also matters when you assign squares yourself. If your group runs an auction, a draft or a charity board where people choose squares after the numbers are visible, the top pairs are worth more than the bottom pairs. Price them accordingly, or use the randomizer so the question never comes up. And if you are running a 25-square board, remember that each square covers four digit combinations, which smooths out some of the extremes.
Limits of the data
These are historical frequencies, not a forecast. Scoring rules, offensive styles and kickoff rules change, and a single season can move a digit by a percentage point or two. The rarest pairs are based on a handful of games, so treat their exact percentages as noisy. The sample includes the partial 2026 season; excluding it changes the final home-digit percentages by at most 0.13 percentage points, so the ranking is stable. The dataset also spans the 2015 move of the extra point to the 15-yard line, but these tables are aggregated across the full period, so this page makes no before-and-after claim about that rule.
Data and method
Source: nflverse play-by-play data (nflverse/nflverse-data on GitHub), one file per season, 2010 through 2026. The sample is 4,485 games: 4,297 regular season and 188 postseason, with 2026 partial at 122 games. Quarter scores are the cumulative home and away scores at the last play of each quarter. The final score is the maximum cumulative score across all plays, so overtime is included. A team-score digit is the score modulo 10, and home and away scores are counted separately for the combined tables. The joint table counts one observation per game, with the home team on the rows and the away team on the columns. All percentages are rounded to two decimal places.