The bot that alerts the sports world like Paul Revere whenever an NFL final score is achieved for the first time in league history has been glitching.
“Scorigami,” a term coined by sports internet personality Jon Bois, refers to games whose final score has never happened before, and most often applied to the NFL. For years, an account on X has sent out updates whenever a Scorigami is achieved, such as the Texans’ 32–12 win over the Chargers last season.
The account also posts the odds that a current game will end in a Scorigami (Super Bowl LIX had an 82.96% chance late in the fourth quarter) and how many times a final score has happened before. Super Bowl LIX’s rare final score of 40–22 had happened once before in 2004; not a Scorigami.
But this season, the Scorigami bot has been unreliable, erratic, and flat-out inaccurate.
The account has missed Scorigamis. Some posts have said there were “0 games” of precedent for common scores. The bot dumped more than a dozen scores and predictions on Thursday afternoon in a torrent.
On Sunday, the bot tweeted that the score of the Buccaneers’ win over the 49ers, 30–19, was not a Scorigami, but in the same tweet it contradicted itself, saying the score had happened 0 times prior. In reality, Sunday was the 10th iteration of that score. The bot reacted exactly the same way to the Panthers’ 30–27 win over the Cowboys, a score that has happened nearly 100 other times.
The account has more than a half-million followers, and NFL fans are distraught by its recent issues. Some of them have even started adding a community note with the correct information when the bot gets a score wrong.
“It’s a great little community that is definitely concerned right now,” sports media personality and Scorigami enthusiast Jake Marsh told Front Office Sports. “It’s kind of a part of history that you can check off each time it happens, just because there are only so many games each year.”
The bot’s creator, Dave Mattingly, told FOS that his attempts to work around Twitter/X platform changes are ultimately causing Scorigami’s recent glitches. He’s asking for fans’ patience while he troubleshoots.
“I’m aware of the recent issues with the Scorigami bot and I apologize for any confusion they’ve caused,” Mattingly said. “This season, X has made some changes to their platform that have contributed to some of the recent problems. I am actively working to get the bot running smoothly again, though as this is a personal side project that I maintain in my spare time, I can’t always respond to issues as quickly as I’d like.”
Since Elon Musk bought the platform, X has changed the rules for accessing the free version of its application programming interface (API). In 2023, X suspended access to its free API, restricting many bot accounts created by humans who weren’t paying for API access. Twitter has since reinstated free access, but it’s extremely limited, and the higher tiers are far from cheap.
Mattingly, a software developer by trade, said the Scorigami account is on the free API tier because the bot “has always been a personal project that I’ve never made any money from.” He says that since last season, X has “greatly decreased” how many posts per day a bot on the free tier can make; he says the method he uses for the Scorigami bot is limited to 16 automated posts per 24 hours, though he can manually add more. Mattingly says that some of the recent glitches “stem from my attempts to throttle and queue messages to stay within those new limits.”
The good news for fans is that the NFL Scorigami website is still up to date, showing both of this year’s Scorigamis to date: Buffalo’s 41–40 win over Baltimore, and the 40–40 tie between the Cowboys and Packers. A Scorigami bot—not run by Mattingly—on X counterpart Bluesky appears to be still going strong.
