Scoring is the mechanism by which points are earned or lost in sports. There are many different ways that a sport can score, including abstract numbers such as the number of touchdowns, or more natural measures like distance or time.

Sports scores are a resource used by online applications to follow sporting events. They are also helpful for fans who want to see how their favorite team is doing.

Game scoring

Across all sports, there are several common patterns in the dynamics of game scoring. These patterns include a close agreement with a Poisson process and a sport-specific rate at each scoring event, with significant deviations only in the first or last few seconds of a game.

Similarly, the bias parameter for overall game balance follows a common Bernoulli process and effectively varies with the size of the lead (Figure 5). In football and hockey, however, this effect is much larger than expected by a simple model of scoring, suggesting that the bias is driven by differences in latent team skill. In basketball, on the other hand, the effect is less large.