Football Squares Odds

What Are the Best Numbers to Have in Football Squares?

Every win rate in this section is pooled across all five scoring periods together, the first quarter, halftime, the third quarter, the final score, and overtime. A single scoring period on its own has different odds, often quite a bit higher or lower, so use the tool above and switch to one specific period if that's what your prize actually pays out on.

The single best square to hold in football is a 7 for the home team paired with a 0 for the away team. Pooling every scoring period across all 1,424 games in our dataset, that exact square has come up 424 times, a win rate of 7.33%. The same pairing in reverse, a 0 for the home team and a 7 for the away team, ranks third at 5.96%, which suggests home teams land on the digit 7 somewhat more often than away teams do. Combine both arrangements of 0 and 7 and the pairing is even more dominant, showing up in 13.29% of every scoring period we counted, better than one out of every eight.

Put together, the top ten squares below account for 47.9% of every scoring period across five NFL seasons, which means just a tenth of the 100 possible squares on a full grid cover almost half of all the scoring we looked at.

Here's a number worth sitting with. Only 26 of the 100 possible squares ever clear even a 1% win rate pooled across every scoring period, well under the 50 you might expect if squares landed anywhere close to evenly. The other 74 squares split whatever is left, several of them barely registering at all, which is exactly why the same handful of numbers keeps showing up at the top of a squares board.

None of this means a square outside the top ten can't win. Every square carries a real chance, just some have much better chances than others. A square holding 2 and 2 has only won twice in five years, and yet it has still won. What this data actually tells you is where the historical odds lean, and it's simply fun and useful information to see the real likelihood of your numbers winning, whether you're comparing your own board or just curious why the same numbers seem to keep winning at every watch party you've been to.

There's no real edge to choosing your square first, either, since the numbers only get randomized once every square on the board has already been claimed. Nobody knows which square will end up holding which numbers, so every square walks away with the same equal shot at landing on the best ones. This data is simply useful context for why some squares at the table always seem to have a story attached to them by the end of the night.

Why Does the Digit 0 Hit So Often?

A 0 shows up on a team's score more than any other digit because of how football scoring actually works. Field goals are worth 3, touchdowns with the extra point are worth 7, and two of either stacking together lands right back on a digit ending in 0, like a 17 or a 20. Add in every game that starts scoreless, and 0 pulls ahead of the pack fast.

The digits 0, 7, 4, and 3 make up more than half of every final score digit in our data, and that pattern holds true whether you're looking at the team that wins or the team that loses. A digit like 5 barely shows up on its own because there's no common single scoring play that produces it directly; a team usually has to combine an odd mix of field goals, touchdowns, and safeties to land there, which happens far less often than the more direct paths to a 0, 7, 3, or 4.

Do the Best Numbers Change as the Game Goes On?

Yes, and the shift is bigger than most odds charts let on. The table below shows 0 and 7 leading at every single scoring period, but its edge shrinks fast as the game goes on. Zero and zero follows a different arc worth noting too: it's the third most common score at the end of the first quarter, since plenty of games are still scoreless early, but it drops to sixth by the final whistle as teams put points on the board.

More scoring plays mean more ways for the board to spread out, which is why even the square leading early in the game becomes far less certain to still be leading once the clock hits zero, and even at its best it was still more likely to lose than win. Halftime sits in an interesting middle spot too: 0 and 3 and 0 and 7 are tied at the top there, each landing on a little over ten percent of games, which tells you the board is already spreading out noticeably by the second quarter compared to how concentrated it is after the first.

If your pool pays out at multiple scoring periods instead of just the final score, which we'd genuinely recommend since it keeps everyone invested in the game longer, use the scoring period selector in the tool above to check a square's real odds at the specific point your prize actually gets awarded. A square that looks strong at the final score might be a weaker pick for a first-quarter prize, and the reverse is just as true. Plenty of hosts run three or four separate prizes across one board, one each for the first quarter, halftime, the third quarter, and the final score, precisely because it turns every quarter into its own small contest instead of one long wait for the last whistle. Add in the reverse score rule too if you want to get even more players involved in the fun.

Are Football Squares Odds Different in the Playoffs?

A little, though the sample size is small enough that you should treat the playoff numbers as a rougher estimate than the regular season figures. Our dataset has 65 playoff games against 1,359 regular season games across the same five years, so a handful of unusual scores can shift the playoff rankings more noticeably. The pairing of 1 and 4 actually leads the playoff final-score list in our data, a different leader than the regular season's 0 and 7, and 20 of the 55 possible pairings never once showed up in a playoff final score during this stretch.

Overtime tells a similar story about sample size. Games reach overtime at a rate of 6.25% across the full dataset, or about 1 in 16, and that rate climbs slightly to 7.69% in the playoffs, likely because playoff teams tend to be more evenly matched, which pushes more games to a close, competitive finish. If you're looking up your square's chances for a playoff game specifically, switch to the playoffs split in the tool above rather than relying on the regular season or combined numbers, and treat any single playoff-only ranking as a lean rather than a guarantee.

The practical takeaway is not to throw out the regular season data just because the postseason is different. With only 65 games in five years, the playoff split will keep shifting meaningfully every time a new postseason gets added to the dataset, while the regular season split, built on more than a thousand games, has settled into a pattern that barely moves from year to year. If you're running a single Wild Card or Divisional Round board, the playoff numbers are still the more honest comparison. If you're running a full-season pool that spans dozens of games, the regular season and combined numbers are the more reliable guide.

How Was This Squares Odds Data Calculated?

We pulled the official score for every NFL game from the 2021-2025 seasons, regular season and playoffs both, a total of 1,424 games. For each one, we recorded both teams' scores at five separate scoring periods: the end of the 1st quarter, halftime, the end of the 3rd quarter, the final score, and the end of overtime for any game that needed it. We took the last digit of each team's score at each scoring period and counted how often every one of the 100 possible home-away pairings showed up.

Most published squares odds only report a pairing averaged across both possible arrangements of it, which can be misleading if you're staring at your own actual grid trying to figure out your real chances. Every ranking on this page keeps the home team and away team separate instead, so the number you see matches the exact square in front of you, not just the pairing in general.

We also publish one pooled view, combining all five scoring periods together, for a single sense of which squares perform best across an entire game rather than at just one moment. That pooled view is what feeds the best-numbers tables earlier on this page, and it's the tool's default so you see the fullest picture first.

Every probability on this page is the count divided by the number of scoring periods for the pooled view, in that split: the 1,359 regular season games, the 65 playoff games, or all 1,424 combined. The one exception is overtime, where we report a pairing's win rate as a share of every game in the split, not just the games that actually reached overtime, so the overtime numbers stay directly comparable to the other four scoring periods instead of looking artificially inflated. This page was last built from real game data on 2026-07-28, and we plan to add each new NFL season to the dataset once it wraps up.

If you're setting up a board of your own and want the numbers randomized the fair way this analysis assumes, the football squares number generator handles that in seconds, and the Ultimate Guide to Hosting a Football Squares Pool walks through everything else, from collecting the prize pool to deciding how many squares to sell for your group's size.