The Real Odds in Football Squares

What This Data Actually Is

This is our own data: last-digit counts from every completed game stored in the Pick My Square scores database, not a national or historical NFL/NCAA dataset. It covers the seasons listed below, and nothing else.

384 NFL games and 4015 college football games, 2025 to 2026 seasons, plus 1381 NBA games for the NBA comparison below. Generated 2026-09-07 from pickmysquare game scores, completed games only. That is a real sample, not a massive one, so treat a single-digit pair's probability (roughly 2 to 4 percent of games in the top-10 tables below) as directional, and treat the big-picture pattern, 0 and 7 leading, basketball flattening out, as solid. It is not close.

How the Numbers Fall, Quarter by Quarter

An NFL score's last digit is not random once the ball is kicked off. It is built out of field goals (3), touchdowns with the extra point (7), and whatever those add up to as the game goes on. Early, before the score has had room to spread out across ten possible endings, that shows up hard: at the end of the first quarter alone, 0 and 7 are the two most common digits by a wide margin in both leagues.

NFL

College Football

The two leagues do not move in lockstep. In the NFL, 0 stays on top through all four phases we tracked. In college football, 0 gives way to 7 by the third quarter and stays behind it through the final score. The extra point has been snapped from the 15-yard line instead of the 2 since 2015, which made the kick less automatic and put a few more two-point tries and missed kicks into the mix. That is part of why a touchdown does not always end in a clean 7, and why 4 (touchdown plus a missed kick, or a field goal on top of an earlier score) climbs so much between the first quarter and the final whistle in both leagues.

The Best (and Worst) Number Pairs

A single digit being strong does not automatically make every pair with it strong. The NFL's top final-score pair is actually a tie: 0-7 and 4-7 both hit 16 times in 384 games. 4 was only the NFL's third-best individual digit at the final score, yet it ties for the single best pair, because how often two digits show up together depends on how the game actually unfolded, not just how common each one is on its own.

College football's list leans on 1 more than you would expect (it shows up in five of the top ten pairs) even though 1 trails 0, 7 and 4 as an individual digit. Pairs are their own thing. Check the actual pair table before you assume a strong single digit means a strong square.

What It Means for Your Square

You cannot pick these numbers. On a real board, every square gets claimed first, then the digits 0 through 9 get shuffled at random across both axes, the same way football squares and Super Bowl squares have always worked. There is no deadline that triggers the draw and no way to see the grid before you claim a square. What you can do is know what you are looking at once the numbers land: a 0 or a 7 on either axis is a strong square, especially in the first half. A 2 or a 5 is a weaker one, but "weaker" still wins plenty of boards over a season.

If your board runs Every Score Wins instead of the standard four quarters, a square wins on every change in score, not just at the four checkpoints we measure here (first quarter, halftime, third quarter, final). 0 and 7 lead at all four of those checkpoints, so for Every Score Wins boards, expect the same digits to keep showing up between them too, though we have not measured every individual score change directly. 3 is the one to watch: it fades between our first-quarter and final-score checkpoints (see the tables above), so it likely matters more early in an Every Score Wins game than late. If your board uses reverse ("backwards winners"), the third-quarter and final squares come from a flipped grid instead of the original one. That does not make weak numbers strong. It mostly protects against one person quietly holding every good number on both axes.

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