Breaking from the recent practice of the NFL’s primary broadcast partners, last month NBC rolled out a new scorebug for their two pre-Super Bowl playoff games rather than waiting to roll it out at the Super Bowl itself. Sunday Night Football coordinating producer Rob Hyland told Sports Video Group that he “want[ed] our team to get a couple of reps with it”: “Let’s get it right for the Super Bowl, not save it for the Super Bowl.” Reading between the lines, one might surmise that NBC wished to avoid the fate of the scorebugs rolled out at the last two Super Bowls, neither of which made it a full year unmodified and one of which has been discarded entirely (though not for non-NFL sports) after only a year.
CBS introduced a scorebug at Super Bowl LVIII that attempted to provide a visual glow-up over their Super Bowl LV scorebug but was crippled by a painfully generic font, and this year took the unusual step of rolling out a new scorebug outside a Super Bowl year or the immediate aftermath of one. Then Fox introduced a new scorebug with minimal backgrounds at Super Bowl LIX that was roundly panned, and proceeded to replace the team abbreviations on backgrounds seen at the Super Bowl with team logos on no backgrounds – which avoided the weird combination of solid colors and transparency seen on the original scorebug, but at the expense of associating a team with a color only if they had the ball and if anything making the bug look all the more slapped together.
NBC’s insight, though, is that there’s no occasion where more people are going to see a scorebug than at the Super Bowl. The scorebug, and the graphics package more generally, serves as the visual frame for the most watched broadcast of the year; for those people who watch the Big Game for the commercials, they may never see the modified version of the Fox scorebug used over the course of the year. Fox’s scorebug for Super Bowl LI was used only for that one game, as it had been heavily modified from the one used the rest of the preceding season, yet it became an iconic symbol of the Patriots’ comeback from 28-3 in that game. (That may have been in no small part to its simplicity, being small, unobtrusive, and almost square.) The Super Bowl is not a time to roll out an untested scorebug in hopes that any kinks will be worked out by the time it’s used for much less important games; it’s a place where you should be sure of the visual statement you want to make.
More generally, the scorebug is the heart of the graphics package, the one element that usually remains constant on screen, the viewer’s guide to understanding what they’re watching. The introduction of the scorebug revolutionized sports on television, allowing viewers to understand the current situation at a glance and follow how the game evolves at every moment. What was once a pretty simple slab of text slapped in the corner of the screen became, within less than a decade, a visual statement helping shape a network’s identity, and later, with the advent of sport-specific graphics packages, shaping the identity of each network’s coverage. With how important sports has become to the networks that air them, scorebugs are perhaps the most important and obvious way that each network distinguishes itself. Scorebugs have become their own form of art, at once providing a practical purpose while also seeking to be pleasing to the eye, unobtrusive but also standing out, hoping to prove worthy of being the viewer’s constant companion through the games they love.
Today, I’m going to honor the best and worst in the past year in scorebugs, strictly based on my own opinion. I watched footage of over 150 different scorebugs, watching it all on my phone to gauge how practical and legible each scorebug was at small sizes. (I may supplement this with watching on my computer next year, as a lot of scorebugs have subtle details that are best appreciated on large screens, assuming I don’t offload a significant chunk of the exercise onto others.) When possible, I would look for video of full games, though not necessarily watching more than a few minutes of each game, to get a sense of how each scorebug feels when experiencing it in real time, without the stop-start interruptions a highlight package can have where you need to look at the bug again just to get your bearings (this also allows me to partially assess the graphics package as a whole). My main criterion for rating each bug was simply considering which bugs I would rather look at while watching each game from a subjective standpoint; I did attempt to focus on each game itself, if only to measure how distracting and in-the-way the bug was, but I didn’t have much connection to each game beyond the bugs themselves, so whichever game was more likely to hold my interest just based on the bug would end up rated higher. I’ve identified the three best and three worst scorebugs in most of the most popular sports (although I’ve only featured the single best and worst in sports with only a handful of national broadcasters), plus the best and worst new scorebugs of the year.
After the jump, the criteria for which scorebugs were eligible for this exercise, and the winners and losers.
Eligibility criteria
- Only scorebugs that appeared at least once, for a broadcast legally and officially available in the United States or Canada, in calendar year 2025 are under consideration.
- Only current scorebugs for current rightsholders as of the end of 2025 are eligible. So I’m not looking at the original/Super Bowl version of the Fox NFL scorebug or any other scorebug that was replaced over the course of the year. I am looking at NBC’s regular season Sunday Night Football bug and not the one that was rolled out for the playoffs or Super Bowl.
- For professional leagues, any national or regional broadcaster in the United States or Canada is eligible. For college, in-house productions by a single school are not eligible.
Additional rules may apply in specific categories, and will be addressed at those points. Without further ado:
College basketball
For college football I made any broadcaster of any FBS game eligible, but there are gazillions of Division I college basketball teams and it would basically be impossible for me to track them all down. So I imposed additional eligibility criteria that would include anything analogous to the college football scorebugs I was including, but didn’t rope in too many super-low-budget graphics that would be unfair for me to pick on. Here’s what I settled on:
- All rights holders for Power 5 conferences are assumed to have at least one game that qualifies them under the following criteria. In addition, they are the only college basketball scorebugs that qualify for the New Scorebug awards.
- Any rights holder for any games from a conference or postseason tournament is eligible.
- Any other outlet that aired a men’s basketball game that was at least Quad 2 for both teams in the most recently concluded season, if they still have rights this season. If they do not, I generally attempt to identify the outlet that would have rights to the game if it took place this season.
In addition, I’ve split the Worst category into “power-conference” and “non-power conference”, so I’m not too hard on outlets with fewer resources while properly blasting outlets that should have the resources to know better.
Worst College Basketball Scorebugs (Non-Power Conference)
3rd worst: KFOX/Sun Bowl Invitational. Last year this event lucked into what ended up being a top 100 NET matchup between Akron and Yale. That game didn’t have a great scorebug, with big fonts, scores to the left of the team names, and cameras on the clocks, but it at least felt like it was intended to be one. Despite actually integrating the clocks into actual text, this one feels more like someone slapped a scoreboard onto the screen of a low-budget stream. By the way, the “1” is presumably supposed to represent which half it is, but this screenshot was taken during the second half and as far as I can tell this was never fixed by the end of the game. Oops.
2nd worst: Nexstar/SoCon. This has all the bones of a good scorebug, so why do I hate it so much? I think it’s the fact that it’s a centered scorebug yet both teams’ scores are on the right side of the team names, making it disorienting trying to figure out what the score is. You expect the scores to be placed symmetrically like the rest of the bug is, yet they just aren’t. Fix that and this might actually be one of the best scorebugs. Also not helping matters is that, depending on the screen you’re watching it on, if one team’s color is dark enough their timeout indicators can be hard to make out.
Worst Non-Power Conference College Basketball Scorebug: Missouri Valley Conference/Gray Media. This isn’t something slapped together by a school with no budget to work with; this is a real graphics package for a syndication package for one of the better mid-major conferences, one good enough to have its championship game on CBS broadcast, and yet this is what they put up for the earlier rounds of the same tournament. There’s even an area dedicated to a sponsor to prove it! They took the Fox graphic, already probably the major-conference graphic you should least attempt to imitate, and made it worse with cameras on the clocks, generic fonts, and making an already big scorebug even bigger by making the font too big for the ancillary stuff at the bottom. I feel like I should be giving them credit for trying to look like a big-boy scorebug, but somehow it feels like the opposite.
Dishonorable mentions: KHQ/Gonzaga, KNSN/Nevada, NEC RSNs.
Worst College Basketball Scorebugs (Power Conference)
3rd worst: Peacock. I am not a big fan of NBC’s post-Super Bowl LVI scorebugs in general, even though the recently-retired SNF scorebug itself is a decent bug with one fatal flaw. The space on the bottom that so awkwardly holds down and distance info in football should actually work better in basketball where there’s so much info to put there, and in fact should work to NBC’s advantage compared to other networks that put the full complement of info there. The bug as a whole, though, is just so bulky when it feels like it would be really easy to trim some height off of it.
2nd worst: TNT. Please tell me this does not presage a new March Madness graphic. I actually think TNT’s new college football graphic is at least interesting, but it does not translate well to a college basketball graphic. The elements feel thrown-together and off-center, the scorebug as a whole feels bulky, and the arrangement of elements in the central element seems like something that an outlet with a much lower budget would come up with, with the massive game clock sitting next to a much smaller shot clock and the spelled out “2ND HALF” looking crammed in at the bottom.
Worst Power Conference College Basketball Scorebug: Fox. This was already a bad scorebug, but I think it’s started to negatively affect the rest of the sport; I already mentioned how the Gray Media/MVC scorebug seems to have been inspired by it, and I also think the arrangement of elements in the central element inspired one of the things that makes the central element in TNT’s scorebug not work. The bulkiness and space-hogging of this bug was roundly panned when it debuted, and I have no idea why anyone would want to copy it.
Dishonorable mentions: CW, CBS.
Best College Basketball Scorebugs
3rd best: FloCollege/College Basketball Invitational. It says a lot about the state of college basketball scorebugs that a bug this simple and low-budget, not even having timeout indicators, is one of the best in the sport. It’s almost not fair putting bugs this bare-bones up against bugs that feel the need to integrate foul count and bonus indicators, but I think it might speak to the value of simplicity. TNT is a particularly obvious case of how trying to squeeze in too many elements can make the whole scorebug fall apart.
2nd best: March Madness (CBS/TNT). This graphic does the best job of accomodating all the information that major network scorebugs feel the need to cram in, and even it arguably speaks to the value of simplicity. It makes it feel so natural you wonder how the other networks can screw it up (and it probably helps that it still doesn’t feel the need to work in team records). I generally like centered graphics (and I think ESPN’s graphic comes close to getting it right if it weren’t for its offbeat vibe and putting team records on a separate line from either the team name or the foul information, wasting space), but the fact seems to be that the networks with centered scorebugs seem to be the ones that most screw up their scorebugs.
Best college basketball scorebug: Mountain West Network. (I’m kind of cheating by using a screenshot from a women’s game.) This scorebug isn’t as polished as the March Madness scorebug (and there’s actually a lot of variance in its execution since it’s used by a lot of different production teams), but I say it’s polished enough compared to most other mid-major scorebugs, and I do think the March Madness scorebug still feels a bit too bulky, even if nowhere near as much as Fox’s. I’m going to ding the college football version of this graphic because it places the quarter and clock to the side and the down and distance in the middle when the other way around might make more sense, but that’s not a factor with this scorebug that simply gets down to business and stays out of the way.
Honorable mentions: MidCo Sports, YES/St. Bonaventure.
Soccer
For this category I considered the top major European leagues – England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France – and their respective cups eligible to the extent they were available in the United States, plus any American leagues, plus any international competition available in the US.
Worst Soccer Scorebugs
3rd worst: CBS. This one isn’t as bad as CBS’ post-Super Bowl LVIII football and college basketball scorebugs, but it still seems kind of obnoxious. The font isn’t as big as those other scorebugs, but it’s still pretty big for a soccer scorebug, and the font is still pretty generic. Not helping matters is that the font used for the clock is different from the rest of the scorebug.
2nd worst: NWSL+. Still, at least the CBS bug looks like an actual professional scorebug. I actually think CBS would be better off copying the general aesthetics of this scorebug, but the fact everything’s just slightly off-center just makes it look too amateurish and kind of ruins it for me.
Worst soccer scorebug: FA Cup. I have no idea why or how the FA thought pushing the clock down relative to the score was a good idea, especially when the stylized trophy that’s doing the pushing doesn’t even have a background. Bad enough that soccer fans seem to prefer scorebugs that don’t take up a lot of vertical space, but you manage to avoid making it aesthetically appealing as well. I also can’t help but wonder if it’s off-putting for soccer fans to have the score centered but separated by the clock, but even as someone that’s not that into soccer, it’s bad enough that this is a scorebug I simply don’t want to have on my screen.
Dishonorable mentions: Copa America Feminina, NWSL/Ion.
Best Soccer Scorebugs
3rd best: Premier League world feed. I probably should be dinging this more for how the score and the Premier League logo are crammed together at the center of the scorebug, but it’s not as distracting at the small size I use to assess these. Instead, my attention is focused on how this bug manages to be snazzy and have some personality while still being simple.
2nd best: DFB-Pokal. This is the German cup competition, and it was a late add to my list of scorebugs as I decided if I was going to include the FA Cup I needed to include other cup competitions’ scorebugs as well. I don’t think I even noticed at smartphone size that the central element with the actual score is shaped like the central circle on a football pitch. The colors are clean, the font is attractive, and spelling out the club names (or at least part of them) is especially appreciated when the abbreviations the Bundesliga’s scorebug uses don’t always make sense to a casual English-speaking fan.
Best soccer scorebug: Fox (specifically the MLS version). Don’t kill me, please! I know I should hate how bulky this scorebug is and the blocky, aggressive font used, and I’m not a fan of the logoless version where team (or country) names are spelled out in smaller font. But something about this version, with the team logos filling out the far ends of the bug, and the slant separating them from the abbreviations adding a dynamic element while adding to the oppositional nature of the positioning of the bug, really speaks to me. Most soccer scorebugs are fairly bland arrangements of simple rectangles, and the attempts to break out of that paradigm often don’t work. To me, this is a good mix of the American emphasis on design with the practicality that most soccer scorebugs go for.
Honorable mentions: MLS/Apple TV, UEFA World Cup qualifiers, Ligue 1, Bundesliga, TNT.
Miscellaneous
To qualify for this category, scorebugs must be used on a broadcast that’s legally available in the United States or Canada, cannot be a reuse of a graphic for another sport that qualifies for a more specific category, and must represent the highest level of their sport unless the broadcast is being produced by one of the Big Five major sports-airing companies or Amazon. In practice, I ended up considering a handful of mid-tier American and Canadian leagues, college sports outside football and basketball, and tennis. There are enough tennis scorebugs to fill out their own category, but I decided tennis isn’t popular enough in the United States to justify it.
Worst Miscellaneous Scorebugs
3rd worst: Billie Jean King Cup. I think my main problem with this is the width of the font used for player names making it look ugly, coupled with the small size of the numbers used for the score of each set and game creating a significant amount of wasted space. But it may also be that the specific match I watched when assessing this involved player names that meshed with it particularly poorly.
2nd worst: Fox/BTN Olympic sports (hockey/baseball/softball/lacrosse). The design philosophy here should work okay, and I actually don’t have a problem with the volleyball version of this bug, but I don’t think it works in practice in part because of how the smaller fonts look at small sizes, which makes it look more low-budget than it probably should be. The haphazard arrangement of elements on the baseball scorebug, with the pitcher taking up considerably more space than the batter that’s crammed in above the diamond, doesn’t help.
Worst miscellaneous scorebug: WTA. What the hell happened? Five years ago the ATP had a shockingly amateurish scorebug while the WTA had an overly aggressive bug that represented a low point in their scorebug design but still felt like more of a real bug than the ATP’s. Even when the ATP introduced a more professional-looking bug the WTA had it beat with a perfectly fine scorebug, so there was a clear trend of the WTA’s bugs being better than the ATP’s. But now the ATP’s bug, while not great, is at least serviceable, while the WTA has rolled out a bug with a super-condensed font that’s especially hard to read with the score, where the numbers don’t take up as much space and are smaller. Why does women’s tennis have to suffer through bad scorebugs like this?
Dishonorable mentions: League One Volleyball, ESPN college hockey.
Best Miscellaneous Scorebugs
3rd best: CFL on TSN. I probably could have dinged this more for the extraneous animation on the down and distance to bring in the position of the line of scrimmage, but I’m not sure how much more important that is to have on a CFL scorebug than an American football one. That aside, this is clean and straightforward and possibly something American networks could take a cue from.
2nd best: Australian Open. (If something seems off, this screenshot was taken from last year’s quarterfinal, not this year’s final.) There’s a reason ESPN takes the world feed’s graphics for this tournament but not for its other two Grand Slams: this bug is clean and serviceable, providing all the information viewers might expect while also being aesthetically pleasing enough that you don’t find yourself wishing professionals would come in and do better. (But while I try to keep 2026 out of this, the less said about ESPN’s attempt to imitate this bug in the final rounds of this year’s tournament, the better.)
Best miscellaneous scorebug: Wimbledon. I’m not a fan of the replay wipe that came with this graphics package, but this feels like the first time that Wimbledon has actually tried to put up a real scorebug on their world feed that’s actually practical to an American. Not too long ago Wimbledon’s scorebug abbreviated player names, and as recently as last year it only had the count of sets won instead of the score of each completed set, but now Wimbledon has officially joined the twenty-first century with both the layout and design of the scorebug. The expansion of the bug to display break/set/match point doesn’t work as well as it should, and the lack of country flags probably prevents ESPN from relying on the world feed graphics like they do in Melbourne, but nonetheless this is a clean, practical scorebug that also manages to be aesthetically appealing in a minimum of space.
Honorable mention: UFL on ESPN.
NFL Preseason
This category is for individual teams’ productions of preseason games that aren’t straight reuses of existing scorebugs that qualify for other categories. Note that these bugs do not qualify for the new-scorebug awards, at least for this year. Also note that the Titans’ only home preseason game was nationally televised by CBS, and as even teams’ own social media accounts take clips from the official NFL account which always uses the home team feed, that means I couldn’t assess their scorebug.
Worst NFL Preseason Scorebugs
3rd Worst: Lions. This feels overdesigned, being way too big and bulky for its britches and not using the space it has very well, giving way too much space to the score and game clock considering how little space it gives to everything else, especially the down and distance. I also just noticed the weird flourish on the ampersand used for down and distance and now I don’t know how long I’ll be able to think about anything else.
2nd Worst: Buccaneers. Wow, I didn’t think anyone was still using a scorebug that switched sides of the screen based on the direction the team with the ball was going! I thought we left that behind in the 2000s! This one may have particularly suffered because of my inability to find full preseason games on YouTube, meaning that the scorebug switching sides every so often on a highlight package was particularly disorienting, but I may also be overcompensating for that and not ranking it as bad enough, with its painfully generic font, odd arrangement of elements, almost unreadable possession indicator, and teeny-tiny play clock placed on the far right side (regardless of team with possession or direction team is moving) of a down-and-distance space that’s way too wide for how tiny the font is. This feels like a haphazardly designed bug two decades past its prime.
Worst NFL Preseason Scorebug: Panthers. It’s always funny looking at how the scorebugs for these insanely rich NFL teams so often look so low-budget, but this is particularly amateurish, like something an FCS school threw together in ten minutes, with a single default font, wasted space, and weird placement of elements.
Dishonorable mentions: Texans, Raiders, Dolphins, Seahawks.
Best NFL Preseason Scorebugs
3rd Best: Bills. Relatively plain and basic, but still clean, functional, and professional. Manages to impress with the team logos busting out of the bug, unobtrusive timeout indicators directly underneath team abbreviations, just a well-executed bug all around. Not much to say about it.
2nd Best: Patriots. The Seahawks may have won on the field, but the Patriots are the clear winner in the preseason scorebug bowl. The Seahawks’ bug has an interesting concept but some fatal flaws in its execution. This one could be dinged for the use of generic fonts, but it’s clean and readable and has enough subtle design flourishes to make up for it.
Best NFL Preseason Scorebug: Bengals. I could ding this one for the use of an aggressive, blocky font if I wanted, but I think that works as much for it as against it, adding a degree of professionalism that wouldn’t be there with plain Helvetica and an aggressiveness that offsets the use of a plain rectangle. It’s a scorebug good enough to make it mildly surprising that it’s only used on NFL preseason games that people only care about because of how NFL-brained they are.
Honorable mentions: Eagles, Browns, Packers.
Motorsport
I only assessed NASCAR, IndyCar, and Formula 1 score pylons for this category, and I disqualified it from the New Scorebug awards because I felt that any straight comparisons would be apples and oranges. (Also, I couldn’t find any full NASCAR races that used any of these graphics; NASCAR puts up full race replays on its own account that strictly use the international feed. That made head-to-head comparisons all the more difficult because I had to use highlight packages with their quick cuts.) Because of the resulting small number of candidates, I’ve only properly recognized a single winner in each category.
Worst Motorsports Score Graphic: NASCAR/CW. Honorable mention to Fox’s IndyCar graphic that makes the top five so big it makes the rest of the graphic look like it’s depicting a different race, but this one takes the cake. It takes up too much space at the bottom of the screen and genuinely looks like it should get in the way, yet the font for the actual racers is small enough to be unreadable on mobile. Fun fact: I originally started assessing this graphic for the New Scorebug category but gave up and disqualified this category for that one, partly because of the reliance on highlights packages but also because in the race I was watching the highlights of, the graphic (or maybe the timing and scoring itself) seemed to keep glitching and move drivers large numbers of positions every few seconds, creating a distracting effect that made it difficult to look at it objectively. Runner-up: IndyCar/Fox.
Best Motorsports Score Graphic: Formula 1. Proof that simplicity is often the best policy – something that I’m saying as much about NASCAR’s stage-racing gimmick that forces their broadcasters to chew up more space making their score pylons more complex as I am about the networks themselves. But all of NASCAR’s score graphics have their quirks that don’t necessarily have to do with that. TNT comes close, but I don’t think it quite measures up to F1’s clean pylon that gets the job done – and the use of driver abbreviations allowing it to economize on horizontal space, which I doubt NASCAR or IndyCar could adopt, probably helps with that. Runner-up: NASCAR/TNT.
Coming up in Part II: the best and worst scorebugs in the traditional four major professional sports and college football, and the marquee award of the night: the best and worst new scorebugs of the year.
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