If you got suckered by one of your coworkers into one of these Super Bowl box pools, don’t worry, consider the money gone, anything you win will be a bonus.  There are 100 boxes in a typical pool, and if you’re playing for the grand prize, which typically is the final score, the odds of hitting one of the boxes SHOULD be 1%, but realistically the real odds spread out depending on the numbers.  The best numbers to have are going to be 0, 3 and 7, since most of the scoring are done in 3 or 7 point increments.

Super Bowl Scores

Let’s first take a look at the final scores for all the Super Bowl games in previous years:

Super Bowl 50 Box Square Pool Probability

Based on the 49 prior Super Bowl matchups, the two most common final scores ended with 4 (winner) and (7 loser), which happend 3 times, and also 1 (winner) and (7 loser), also happened 3 times.

Super Bowl Box Square Pool Probability Based on 2015 Regular Season Scores

But the sample size is so small with just 49 games, and most of those games were played in different eras, they definitely do not reflect the pace and strategies of current football games.  So to get a better perspective of football score box probabilities, let’s take a look at the odds from scores for the 2015 season, including 10 playoff games, making the sample size of 266 games.

As you can see from the table below, the best number to have is definitely number 0, and followed not too far behind are 3, 4, and 7.  The worst number to have by far would be the Debbie downer number 5.

Good luck and enjoy the big game!