Billions of dollars will be wagered on the Super Bowl on Sunday, spotlighting the popularity of betting on football. A big part of the appeal is the scoring system, which was developed nearly 150 years ago by the “father of football,” Walter Camp, and is unique among the globally popular team sports.
Football allows scores of 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8 points, unlike sports like soccer and hockey, which allow only single points per score, and scores are low. In the 2022 World Cup, only 2.7 goals were scored on average by both teams in matches, and in the 2021-2022 NHL, the average was 6.2. At the other extreme, in the 2021-2022 NBA season, fans saw an average of 115 scoring events per game, for 1, 2 or 3 points each.
Now we get geeky. Rare events like soccer and hockey goals tend to follow a smooth curve called a Poisson distribution. Aggregations of many events tend to follow a different smooth curve called a Normal distribution. But football scores, with moderate numbers of different-sized scoring events, do not resolve to any smooth curve nor any standard distribution.
