Zeroes and sixes: The most common final score tallies in Wyoming football

When Cheyenne East’s players burst off the sidelines and onto the field at Cheney Alumni Field in Casper on Nov. 3, 2006, the Thunderbirds were celebrating a huge victory in their season — and a historic one for the state’s football teams.

Their 5-3 victory against Natrona put East into the state championship game for the second consecutive year. The T-Birds made it to the title game the hard way, winning two hard-fought road games to get there; they had beaten Evanston 10-6 the week before the big win against the Mustangs.

But East’s victory stood out for another reason, one beyond the in-season ramifications: the final score.

East won the game by scoring five points, something that hadn’t been done in nearly a century.

In fact, the least common final scores in the 122 seasons of Wyoming high school football below 77 points are scores of 4 and 5.

The final score of 4 has only happened seven times in that 122-season span. The final score of 5 has happened 20 times, but 14 of those came prior to 1912, when touchdowns were worth five points instead of six. So, since 1912, the final score of 5 has only happened six times — including East’s 2006 victory against Natrona, the ONLY time since 1912 that a team has won a game by scoring exactly five points.

Conversely, the most popular final score (zero) has happened 7,628 times in Wyoming’s nearly 24,000 high school games on record; the second-most popular final score of 6 has been reached 4,865 times.

The 11 most popular final scores, all with at least 1,000 occurrences, through the end of the 2015 season:

0: 7,628
6: 4,865
7: 3,008
14: 2,423
13: 2,262
12: 2,239
20: 1,878
19: 1,223
26: 1,163
21: 1,145
8: 1,039

The lowest final score to never be reached is 98 points. Final scores of 94, 95 and 97 have only been achieved once.

Here is how often each final score has been reached, through the end of the 2015 season:

Point occurrences through 2015

In the next post, we’ll take a look at those occurrences when teams have finished with the unique final scores of 4 and 5.

–patrick