There are all different ways of nerding out about sports. It can be the X’s and O’s, it can be random stats, it can be the history of the game itself, or it can be something extremely niche that raises eyebrows whenever you bring it up.
One of those niches is the world of scorigami, a term born from the mind of SB Nation’s Jon Bois, who’s gained a cult following for the niche topics he concocts on his and his company’s YouTube channel.
In basic terms, scorigami is the study of final scores in a distinct setting and plotting them. In Bois’ original concept, he looked through every final score in NFL history, dating back to 1920, and plotted them on a chart. The original video, which was later turned into a series several years later, is still an incredible watch that I can’t recommend enough:
Scorigami has since taken many different forms through imitators. Accounts exist on Twitter/X for NBA scorigami, college football scorigami, quarterback line scorigami, pitching line scorigami, and even MLB scorigami, which is quite literally impossible given the constructs of the game.
What I haven’t seen, at least in the public sphere, is scorigami for a specific college football team. Sure, there’s this site where you can find an interactive map of every team’s scorigami, but that’s less fun than focusing on one team.
A previous Onward State staffer actually did take a crack at this back in 2021, but we must think bigger.
But what if we try something different? In seeing all these different scorigami universes, I got the idea to make a Penn State football edition, but with a twist. Every single version of scorigami studies only one side of a chart, studying just the victories. That’s for obvious reasons if you’re doing an entire sport.
What if we measured every single final score a team has ever generated, win, loss, or tie, and put them on a chart?
Penn State has played 1,380 games in its history, and as it welcomes USC for the White Out in game No. 1,381, here’s what (almost) all of those games look like.
Behold:
For those unfamiliar with the scorigami concept, here’s how you read the chart above:
- The x-axis is Penn State’s score, and the y-axis is the opponent’s score.
- Games above the diagonal green line are Penn State wins; games below the red line are Penn State losses. The middle? Ties, a concept that existed in college football until 1995.
- The navy blue boxes without a number have occurred only once. The number inside the box correlates with how often the outcome has occurred.
Now, you might be remembering some games that don’t fall on this 75×50 chart. Don’t worry, they’re accounted for too. To fit every single game in Penn State history on this chart, you would need to zoom out so far that it would simply be unreadable.
Beyond the reaches of the chart above sit just 14 games. Penn State has allowed more than 50 points just seven times in program history and has also scored more than 75 points only seven times. That means roughly 99% of all Penn State games ever played, dating back to an unofficial contest against Lewisburg in 1881, sit on this chart.
Give yourself some time to look for some of your favorite and least favorite scores, then join me down here to break down what we have:
The Trends
If you look for some trends here, you can find a bunch of different themes.
There are a lot of shutouts, a byproduct of how lopsided the game used to be. Few games have a team score only three points, but many fall into the six-, seven-, 13-, and 14-point columns. Almost every score there has happened.
There are a few huge gaps. You can probably guess why we don’t see many teams score two, four, or five points. Scoring one point, while possible, is just never going to happen. Eight and 11 points usually require very nuanced circumstances.
You can tell that defense has always been a defining feature of this program by how concentrated all the outcomes are below 28 points. Even as scoring exploded, very few teams cleared 30 against Penn State.
The Most Common Scores In Penn State History
0-0 (15 times): The most common score… is no score. Shocking, I know. In the early days of football, scoring was at a premium, so this happened quite a lot.
The first scoreless tie in Penn State history came on October 5, 1895, on the road at Cornell in front of 1,000 spectators. The most recent one came during World War II, when the quality of many college football teams decreased due to the war, on October 9, 1943, against Colgate.
27-0 (13 times): It’s pretty startling that we get a fairly lopsided score as the second-most common, but of all the shutouts on this list, this one is more common in the post-World War II world.
The Nittany Lions won by that score two consecutive weeks to start the 1902 season against Dickinson Seminary and Pitt. It most recently occurred on Halloween 1998 against Illinois.
13-0 (12 times): Another score more common back when the sport was in its infancy, the first such game came on September 26, 1914, against Westchester before happening again two weeks later. The most recent came on November 20, 1954, to end the season against Pitt.
6-0 (11 times): You might think 7-0 would be more common, but it has only occurred seven times. Back in the day, extra points weren’t as automatic as they are today, plus the fact that in the 19th century, touchdowns counted as two points and extra points were four points.
A road game at Virginia to kick off the 1893 season on October 14 was the first time this score happened, but it hasn’t happened at Penn State since October 21, 1944, in a sparsely attended game at Colgate.
12-0 (11 times): By the same nature of 6-0 being more common than 7-0, so is 12-0 more common than 14-0, which has only happened seven times.
One week after being destroyed 106-0 by Lehigh, Penn State concluded its 1889 season with a 12-0 win over Bucknell on November 25. The last time this score happened was on October 28, 2006, in West Lafayette, Indiana, in an ugly game against Purdue.
0-7 (10 times): The only loss to happen at least 10 times came, predictably, in old-timey fashion. One touchdown and that’s about it.
It first occurred on October 20, 1917, against Washington & Jefferson on the road, but hasn’t happened since November 20, 1948, against Pitt, when the No. 6 Nittany Lions soiled their 6-0-1 record in embarrassing fashion to an unranked rival.
34-0 (10 times): Blowouts are littered across this board, but none are more common than the 34-0 beatdown.
Penn State first posted this score on November 26, 1898, against Dickinson, but has done so as recently as September 6, 2025, against FIU.
28-7 (9 times): A few scores have happened exactly nine times, but I wanted to highlight this score as the most common non-shutout on the board. Four touchdowns to one, pretty simple.
Its first iteration came on October 30, 1920, on the road at Penn in front of 30,000 fans. It’s happened twice since the turn of the millennium, most recently on October 26, 2019, against Michigan State.
The Art Of Shutouts
In our 1,380-game list, there are 419 shutouts. Penn State scored 304, and its opponents scored 130 (both sets include the 15 scoreless draws).
As much as they may be boring to watch, football history is littered with unfair playing fields. Almost every game in the early days of football ended in a shutout, whether small, like a routine 10-0 win over Bloomsburg Normal School in November 1897, or big, like the 68-0 thrashing of the Altoona Athletic Association in November 1890.
Almost every possible shutout has happened multiple times, especially on the winning side. Penn State has won a game in every type of shutout, from 2-0 to 61-0. Only a few of them have happened only once:
- 3-0 vs. Pitt (November 30, 1912): Pretty basic, just a field goal
- 4-0 vs. Carlisle Indians (October 6, 1906): Two safeties in a game by one team is extremely rare, especially nowadays.
- 8-0 vs. Dickinson (October 10, 1896): Before the two-point conversion was introduced in 1958, it was nearly impossible to achieve.
- 11-0 vs. Dickinson (November 12, 1904): Was this a safety, touchdown with no extra point, and field goal?
- 36-0 vs. Furman (November 1, 1958)
- 51-0 vs. Geneva (October 17, 1908)
- 53-0 vs. Lebanon Valley (September 24, 1921)
The largest shutout defeat in program history (aside from the Lehigh game) is just 47-0, which happened against Penn in 1899 and Cornell in 1939. Penn State has 47 shutout victories by at least 48 points.
The High-Scoring Shootouts
Every high-scoring game in Penn State history is on the chart. The 14 stragglers were all historically lopsided, except for the 2017 Rose Bowl (49-52).
All the fun games you remember are buried deep beneath the uncharted white blocks. The four-overtime game against Michigan, the 56-44 blockbuster win over Nebraska on a rainy day in 2017, the 59-34 win over Rutgers in the Meadowlands in 1995, and James Franklin pulling off 62-24 and 63-24 blowouts in a three-year span.
Here are the highest-scoring non-shutout games to occur more than once:
- 66-14
- 63-10
- 57-13
- 45-24
- 38-31
- 55-13
- 45-22
- 45-21
- 35-31
- 25-38
The Wild, Wild West
So, what about those 14 games? Six of them are shutouts, five on the winning side.
The most lopsided loss in Penn State history by a country mile was an unbelievable 106-0 defeat at the hands of Lehigh on November 11, 1889. After that, it was a November 1899 loss to the Duquesne Athletic Club, which ended in a unique score of 64-5.
The Nittany Lions have lost games 55-14 to a powerhouse Navy in October 1944 and 63-14 to No. 4 Ohio State in an infamous beatdown on October 26, 2013.
The other two games on the losing side? That instant classic of a Rose Bowl and a 51-30 loss to No. 7 West Virginia on October 29, 1988.
Now on the winning side, the largest win in Penn State history was 109-7 against Lebanon Valley on October 23, 1920. After that, you have a 99-0 drubbing of St. Bonaventure and an 80-0 rout against Gettysburg that happened in consecutive weeks in 1917.
An 82-0 win over Susquehanna in 1926 and a 79-0 win over Geneva in 1917 complete the ancient blowouts, but there have even been two in the 21st century that have stretched the limit of the chart.
Joe Paterno’s bunch eviscerated Cincinnati, 81-0, in 1991. The biggest win of the Franklin era came against Idaho in 2019 at Beaver Stadium, where the Nittany Lions rolled to a 79-7 victory.
I Can’t Believe This Happened Twice
To finish this off, I found it interesting that some of the recent games with peculiar scores that have gone down in Penn State infamy have, indeed, happened more than once.
Fans of a certain age will wince when the scoreline 6-4 is brought up. A miserable 2004 season reached its zenith on October 23 at Beaver Stadium, when two miserable offenses in miserable conditions gave the college football world an infamously awful game that consisted of two field goals and two safeties.
Somehow, this had happened before. Penn State lost 6-4 to Navy on November 16, 1907, in Annapolis, Maryland. It even had another game with such a score, beating Syracuse on the road on November 2, 1929.
Moving to the Franklin era, who could forget the infamous nine-overtime game against Illinois, where the Nittany Lions lost a miserable 20-18 affair as a heavy favorite. While that game was certainly one-in-a-million, the final score wasn’t.
Penn State had both won and lost games prior to that Illinois game in 2021 by a 20-18 margin. It defeated Maryland on the road on September 5, 1985, to open that season, while losing by that score on November 7, 1959, in a big top-10 battle with No. 4 Syracuse.
Finally, we got another unorthodox score to end the Franklin era with a 22-21 loss to Northwestern. The score is not nearly as famous as the other two, but it stuck out to me as a score I expected to be a scorigami, but it wasn’t. Rip Engle’s group lost to Pitt on December 7, 1963, by that score.
All in all, we have hundreds of scorigamis across this infinite board, including four since Franklin was fired. Matt Campbell got on the board with the ugly 34-13 loss at New Ryan Field on Saturday.
Will Saturday get us another one?
Source: onwardstate.com
