Scorigami

Scorigami and Creative Freedom

As you may have surmised by now, I'm a big fan of what Jon Bois and co are accomplishing at Secret Base. Once their Patreon was announced, I quickly rushed to subscribe to them. In turn, new major releases on said Patreon have become appointment viewing.

Overall, my favorite works to come out of Secret Base have been the multi-part odysseys that Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein have collaborated on. The announcement that they would be doing a four part series on scorigami piqued my interest more intensely than anything else they have put out.

Scorigami, a term Jon Bois made up to note that a given final score has never happened before in NFL history, has spread like wildfire into the popular consciousness. A given matchup ending up in a scorigami guarantees that people out there will remember that game, regardless of the stakes that it had going in. The concept is famous enough that announcers have namedropped it on air when it happens.[1]

Whenever you invent a concept and ascribe importance to it, you in turn gain the freedom to do whatever you want with that concept. The staggering amount of possible angles that Jon and Alex could tackle a four-part miniseries on a concept that is their own heightened my anticipation for its release AND captured my attention during its entire runtime.

My expectations were challenged over and over again. I went into the series expecting a straightforward history of the NFL with important games that happened to be scorigamis highlighted and given the game recap treatment similar to notable games in the Vikings and Falcons docs in rapid fire fashion, with the thesis ultimately being "you can't tell the history of the NFL without scorigamis".

The full game recap was used more sparingly than I had thought going in, to the series' benefit. The Dorktown trademark of lines in team colors moving up and down the gridiron is paired with the scorigami board to illustrate the turns of events that cause games to become scorigamis.

Due to a concept being the star of the show and not any concrete organization/entity, Scorigami is also lighter on Remembering Some Guys than other Bois/Rubenstein creations. The expected exception was of course Pete Carroll, who won scorigami games in seven straight years as Seahawks head coach, including the most recent Super Bowl to end in scorigami. What wasn't expected was a guest spot from Mina Kimes! Her and Jon really sold the fact that these wins captured the zeitgeist of the Carroll-era Seahawks.[2]

The series slowly introduces variations on a theme, such as the "encrypted scorigami" (scores that can only be constructed one way, of which six out of nineteen have been accomplished) and the "eternal scorigami" (final scores that have only happened once through the end of the 2024 season). The concept of an "eternal scorigami" raises the possibility of a new challenge that some commenters have picked up on independently: getting those particular final scores to happen a second time.

The central image of Scorigami is the iconic scorigami board. While other feature length Bois/Rubenstein series have to stretch a little to construct a set that properly frames the story they want to tell[3], the scorigami board is something that already exists. The population and changing of the dimensions of the board over the years is a story that naturally fell into Jon and Alex's laps. With the technology available to them, they even add a third dimension that outlines the frequemcy of each final score. Individual features on the board made by patterns of scores that have or have not been achieved have begun to recieve their own names and develop their own fandoms, such as the "Tetris cannon" fixtured around 32-12, a score that had remained unachieved until the 2024 postseason.

The Future

The creativity that comes with ownership of the concept of scorigami, the mastery of the signature style of data visualization, and the need to subvert expecations all came to a head with the fourth and final episode of the series, which focused on the future. Jon and Alex have never done any at-scale discussions of the future of a sport before, so I immediately got to work predicting what they could do in this unprecedented siuation.

Would they discuss potential rule changes and their ramifications, such as adding ways to score exactly one point (ie: the CFL's rouge)[4] or turning off the tie faucet completely (most easily accomplished by simply exporting the postseason overtime rules to the regular season)? Would they speculate on what it would take to get 74+ points on the board in today's NFL? Will there be predictions about if anyone who rose to prominence in the 2020s has the potential to go on a Carroll-esque scorigami streak?

These and other more practical questions were left (mostly)[5] unanswered, as Secret Base opted to instead push the concepts of scoring points in football and the presentation style to their absolute limits. The result is an absurdist comedy that is one of the few instances of an episode of a Bois and/or Rubenstein miniseries standing on its own as cinema in and of itself.[6]

To fully understand what makes this episode stands alone as cinema, we must start by looking back to the leadup to its premier. Jon went and proclaimed that there would be not one but three charts (with added scene-setting) that are more cursed than the visualization of the 241 million to one odds of Dave Steib losing no-hitters with one strike to go in consecutive starts. As a writing exercise, I will attempt to explain what makes these charts fucked up with words alone.

  1. First up is the aptly- and ominously-named "Probability Monolith". Earlier on in the series, there is a chart that illustrates the combined odds of every NFL final score that has happened, obtained by multiplying the amount of times the two team point totals in the game have occurred together. Jon notes that at this point, statisticians are already being driven up a wall, as simply looking at precedent isn't an adequate predictive measure. Jon blows past those warnings by representing a single NFL game as a cube, placing 40000 of those cubes on a grid, and then going through a bunch of possible NFL final scores and their "due dates" based on this methodology. Any pretenses of this remaining a two dimensional plane are shattered very quickly as additional layers need to be piled on. The only save point on the journey we are embarking on is the probability monolith being a perfect cube of 8 million smaller cubes/games; multiples of these cubes will stack up on top of each other very quickly. Serendipitously, the longest odds possible according to combined odds, any combination of two team totals that have only been reached once, tops out at approximately 1 billion to 1 (exactly 125 cubes). Before we move on from this chart, we are given an example of how this methodology can dramatically understate the true odds of a score happening by way of the 4-4 tie. Actually doing the math on the probability of the only way a 4-4 tie can happen brings up odds of around 272 billion to one; the construction of 272 additional full towers and the calendar fast-forwarding to a century where the sun expands to being a red giant brings this particular absurdity home. Any single cube representing one game can not be picked out from the skyline created by this exercise; the two scales are incompatable with each other.
  2. Next, we bear witness to a routine by which two teams can create a theoretically endless game where the team that kicks off to start the game can subsequently score an infinite amount of points. The kicker boots the ball in the end-zone, where the returner, upon cleaning catching the ball, simply places the ball down in the end zone and a member of the kicking team falls on it for a free six points without any time elapsing. Lining up for a two-point conversion attempt, the quarterback waltzes into the end zone with a naked bootleg. The quickest way to rectify any failure modes in this process is for the quarterback of the recieving teams offense to throw a pick six, estimated to cost only five seconds. With all of this in mind: the benchmarks of success are 57600 points at a 90% success rate, 576000 points at a 99% success rate, 5.76 million points at a 99.9% success rate, and onward to infinity. Jon is confident enough in the efficacy of this process that humans executing it 99% of the time is within reason, which sets our human limit at a final score of 576000-0. We then cut back to the main, 73-by-51 scorigami board, to see just how far away 576000-0 would be from the boundaries of the board that currently exist. To reach the location of this score if it was placed on nflscorigami.com, one would scroll to the right endlessly. Zooming out in an attempt to get it and the main board in frame would be futile.
  3. Finally, there is the eternal mystery of the defensive one-point safety, the only way to put a "1" on the scoreboard. Accomplishing this requires the team looking to convert after a touchdown suffering a safety 85 (in the case of a PAT) or 98 (in the case of a two-point conversion) yards in the other direction. While these scenarios can be drawn up, it is difficult to imagine 22 NFL players letting it happen organically. At first glance, the final score of the building block that includes this one-point safety, 6-1, would be the crown jewel of scorigami. Alex did his due diligence to take note of any potential scores to tack on on top of 6-1 to create a far rarer score, ultimately coming up with the team up 6-1 (hereafter known as "Team A") forcing two traditional safeties (on what we'll be calling "Team B") to bring the total to 10-1. Alex shows all the work that he put into four different models for determining the probability of all three elements required for a 10-1 game to happen: Team A scoring a touchdown and then suffering a defensive one-point safety, Team A scoring no additional touchdowns or field goals with Team B not scoring any touchdowns, field goals, or standard safeties, and Team A forcing two standard safeties. These four models, which differ by sample size and how the second and third elements are calculated, result in estimates of this game occurring one in 2 trillion, 4 trillion, 13 trillion, and 18.5 trillion games. Every technique Jon has pioneered up to this point would be inadequate in visualizing these numbers. The solution to this he improvises is to create a tracker that counts every pixel of work him and Alex have collaborated on and putting it in direct comparison to the benchmarks Alex set. We are treated to every video being fast-forwarded through simultaneously, being added to the pixel counter when their runtime finishes. It takes the completion of Secret Base's longest single video, The People You're Paying to Be in Shorts to have the pixel count cross the third benchmark. Putting the bow on top of all of this is that Jon is one of the few people I earnestly believe has a favorite pixel.

The last major departure Scorigami takes from other Bois/Rubenstein creations is that the thesis, the "why", is not divulged until the very end. This may be disappointing to those who prefer to see the long Dorktown arc of the universse bend, but I think this decision works in the series' favor.

I think it's really important for some things to be allowed to mean nothing; to serve no purpose, teach no lesson, offer no enrichment generate no money, require no justification.

This quote from Jon's closing monologue about the societal role scorigami plays ends up doubling as a selling point for watching this series. Can't wait for their next work.

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