The Most Common NFL Scores, and What Each One Means on a Squares Board

The most common NFL final scores from 2021 through 2025 are 20-17, 23-20, 27-24, 27-20 and 20-16, and the top three are well clear of everything else on the list.

We counted the true final score of every regular season and playoff game in those five seasons, 1,359 regular season games and 65 playoff games, with any overtime points included, and treated 20-17 the same whichever team finished on 20. Here are the eight scores that showed up most often, with the two last digits each one leaves on a squares board.

Right behind those eight, seven more scores tied at 11 games apiece: 16-13, 20-10, 19-17, 30-24, 24-10, 31-28 and 17-10. Even the leader only lands about once in every 43 games, which tells you how spread out NFL results really are. Those 1,424 games produced 515 different final scores, and 234 of them happened exactly once.

The all-time picture agrees with the recent one. BroBible's October 2025 count of every final score in league history, taken from the NFL Scorigami database, put 20-17 first with 298 games, then 27-24 with 239 and 23-20 with 214. The order of the next two flips in recent seasons, and that's about the only difference, which is why we lean on the five-season numbers. They describe the game being played today, with today's kickers and today's extra-point rule.

The leader barely moves from year to year either. 27-24 topped the 2021 season, 20-17 led both 2022 and 2023, 23-20 took 2024, and 2025 finished with 23-20 and 27-24 level at seven games each. Scoring itself has stayed in a tight band too, with the average game producing between 43.8 and 46.1 combined points in every one of those seasons.

So many NFL games end 20-17, 23-20 or 27-24 because almost every point in football arrives as a 7 or a 3, and close games tend to finish exactly one field goal apart.

A touchdown with the extra point is 7 and a field goal is 3, and those two plays account for the overwhelming majority of the points scored in any NFL game. Add them up in the most natural combinations and you keep landing on the same totals. Two touchdowns and two field goals make 20, two touchdowns and a field goal make 17, three touchdowns and two field goals make 27, and three touchdowns and a field goal make 24. Safeties, two-point conversions and missed extra points all happen, but they're rare enough that they just sprinkle a few odd totals around the edges.

The second half of the story is the gap between the teams. In our five seasons, 219 of the 1,424 games, or 15.38%, finished with the winner exactly 3 points ahead, more than any other margin. A tight game late in the fourth quarter usually gets settled by a field goal, either a winner at the end of regulation or the first score in overtime. Put a 3-point gap on top of the most natural team totals and 20-17, 23-20 and 27-24 fall straight out of the arithmetic.

Single-team scores tell the same story from the other side. Out of 2,848 team scores across those games, a team finished on 20 points 209 times, or 7.34%, ahead of 17 at 6.32%, 24 at 5.79% and 27 at 5.72%, with 10 close behind at 5.13%. A team was held to zero 29 times, the highest score in the stretch was 70, and no team finished on exactly 1 point, which is technically possible in the NFL but has never actually happened.

The most common total score in an NFL game is 37 points, which happened in 58 of the 1,424 games from 2021 through 2025, or 4.07% of them, with 51, 44 and 43 close behind.

A 20-17 game adds up to 37, which explains most of that lead on its own, and 27-24 makes 51 while 27-17 makes 44. The average across all five seasons was 45.18 combined points and the median was 44, so a typical game sits right around the middle of the 40s with a long tail of shootouts above it.

Combined totals matter far more to squares players than most people realize, because they decide the 10-square score-sum board. On that format there's no grid at all, just ten squares marked 0 through 9, and the winner is the last digit of both teams' scores added together. Here's how often each digit was the last digit of a final combined score in our five seasons.

Notice how much flatter that is than a regular board. The best digit, 7, came up 12.57% of the time and the worst, 2, still managed 7.51%, so every square on a score-sum board stays in the game. Compare that with a 100-square board, where some pairings almost never win a final score. It's one reason our 10-square football pool format works so well for a small group that wants every player to have a real chance all night.

No Super Bowl final score has ever happened more than twice, and only three have repeated at all: 21-17, 27-10 and 27-17, each twice across the 60 games played so far.

Sixty games is a tiny sample next to a full NFL season, so the Super Bowl list is mostly one-offs. Those 60 games produced 57 different final scores. The most common score for one team to finish on is 17, which has happened nine times, followed by 10 and 31 with eight each, and the average Super Bowl has produced 46.8 combined points, a touch higher than a regular season game today.

The last five show how little the big game cares about the usual pattern. Super Bowl LVI finished 23-20, right on one of the three most common scores in football, but the next four went 38-35, 25-22 in overtime, 40-22 and 29-13. That's exactly why the most common NFL scores tell you about the long run rather than about any single game, and why the squares that win on Super Bowl Sunday can look nothing like the ones that win most often in October. If you want every quarter of every Super Bowl, with the squares each one paid, our list of Super Bowl quarter scores has all 60 games laid out, and our Super Bowl squares page shows how a board runs on the night itself.

The most common NFL scores mean that a handful of squares on every board, the ones holding a 0, 7, 3 or 4, win far more often than the rest, even though nobody gets to choose which square ends up with which digits.

Squares only cares about the last digit of each score, so 20-17 is a 0 against a 7, 23-20 is a 3 against a 0 and 27-24 is a 7 against a 4. Because either team can be the one in front, each of those scores covers two squares on a 100-square board, and the six squares in the first figure on this page are where the three most common results in football land. Hold one of those after the draw and you've had a lucky night before kickoff. Our guide to reading football squares walks through finding your numbers on any board size if you're new to the grid.

What you can't do is aim for those squares. Players pick their squares, or let the host place them, while the board is still blank, and the digits only get randomized once every square is claimed. So the common scores tell you how strong your draw turned out to be, never which square to claim. That's the whole idea behind the game, and it's what keeps it fair for the person who grabbed a square in the corner just as much as the person who took one in the middle. Our piece on Super Bowl squares strategy covers the few choices that do make a difference, like how many squares you hold and whether they share a row.

Final scores are only one of the prizes on most boards, too. Plenty of games are still 0-0 or 3-0 after the first quarter, so a 0 or a 3 has an even bigger day early on, while the final score spreads out much more. Our football squares odds tool lets you check any home and away pairing at the end of every quarter, at halftime, on the final score and in overtime separately, which is the best way to see how your square's chances shift as the game goes on.

Use the most common NFL scores as a way to follow your squares, not to choose them, since they tell you which results you're rooting for once the numbers are on the board.

Once the digits are drawn, you can glance at your squares and know straight away whether a late field goal helps you or hurts you. If you're holding a 0 against a 7, a game drifting toward 20-17 is the dream finish, and a two-point conversion that pushes it to 22 is the nightmare. That running commentary is half the fun of a squares pool, and it's why the same few scores come up again and again in every group chat on a Sunday.

If you're hosting, the common scores are a good reason to pay every quarter instead of only the final, since a 0 or a 7 already wins plenty while the quarter prizes give the squares with rarer digits a few more chances during the game. A Play Squares board follows the live score for every NFL game, highlights the square that's on track to win the current quarter, and lets every player check their own squares instead of texting you after each touchdown. Our NFL squares page shows how it works for a regular Sunday game.