If you haven’t already, make sure to check out Part I for the eligibility rules and the best and worst scorebugs in the categories not covered in this post. And now, the rest of the awards…
NHL
Worst NHL Scorebugs
3rd worst: Scripps Sports (Lightning/Golden Knights/Panthers). There were four different scorebugs that I’m not sure I was really able to differentiate for the second and third worst spots. This one is just awkwardly spaced with large spaces for the score that won’t get used 99% of the time and shot count crammed into the minimum amount of space left, plus the clock is a bit too large and obnoxious. Still, I’m not quite sure it’s worse than Monumental.
2nd worst: Prime Video (Canada). My appreciation of this scorebug may have been hindered by the lack of any full games with Prime production being available on YouTube, whereas every other producer of NHL games had a game posted by somebody and managing to escape the copyright bots, meaning I had to rely on highlight packages that didn’t allow my experience to flow with quick cuts and regular cutting to replays without the bug. The color pairing of the game I actually watched (a Bruins-Senators game where the Bruins’ part of the bug was black-on-yellow) may not have helped either. Nonetheless, there’s just something off about the overall aesthetics of the bug, and the shot count feels kind of plain (putting “shots” vertically between the two counts without any other vertical separation doesn’t really work regardless of who tries it). But I think the worst part might be the part that doesn’t weigh much on my thinking: the power play clock replacing the large Prime logo with something that wastes space and doesn’t use the space it does use very effectively. It’s an interesting idea with questionable execution.
Worst NHL Scorebug: Victory+ (Stars/Ducks). Similarly, I might not have given this bug the top spot if I didn’t live in Los Angeles and have a chance to casually flip to a Ducks game and see this bulky scorebug with the way-too-bold font size, the poorly-centered clock, and the same questionable shot-count implementation as the Prime Video scorebug. I wouldn’t say it immediately struck me as the worst hockey scorebug, but it certainly stuck out as pretty bad.
Dishonorable mentions: Monumental Sports/Capitols, SEG/Mammoth.
Best NHL Scorebugs
3rd best: FanDuel SportsNet. Again, don’t kill me! I know people hate the FanDuel graphic in general and its hockey implementation in particular, but I do think it works for its intended purpose of filling the space that a bottom-of-screen ticker would so it stays out of the way and leaves a whole uninterrupted space to show the actual action. This particular screenshot suggests that the bottom-of-screen placement not only is unlikely to actually cover anyone up, it might be less obtrusive than some corner-bug implementations when the action is on the right side of the ice. The use of the right side of the graphic as a ticker seems to have been all but abandoned, and that can lead to a lot of wasted space in some sports, but in hockey, where there seems to be increased interest in everyone that’s on the ice and their current ice time, FanDuel has effectively integrated that information into the scorebug itself rather than have a separate ticker at the bottom of the screen like Victory+ (or TNT on power plays).
2nd best: Sportsnet. This is not a perfect scorebug (obviously; it’s only in second and only a spot ahead of Fanduel); I don’t like how the team logo comes in to provide enough space for the power play clock or the wasted space for the shot count, so I feel like this could have used some more tweaking to work, but all in all it’s a clean, functional scorebug that does a better job with the task in front of it than a lot of hockey scorebugs.
Best NHL Scorebug: NHL Network Showcase. So the NHL has seemingly chased off any and all top-of-screen score banners that previously existed in favor of usually-compact corner bugs, except for its own production which is the last top-of-screen centered bug left, and it’s the best one in the sport. That’s not entirely unrelated to being centered either; the oppositional, symmetrical arrangement results in one of the better implementations of shot count without creating too much distance between the scores. If this is the bug teams fleeing the collapse of FanDuel Sports Network end up adopting next season, they might be in good hands.
Honorable mentions: MSG, CHSN.
NBA
Worst NBA Scorebugs
3rd worst: CHSN (Bulls). There are a lot of bad regional scorebugs, as we’ll see not only in the dishonorable mentions but also in the New Scorebug category, and that’s especially been the case as more and more teams have left the RSN groups of the past for their own, lower-resourced startup outlets. This one shouldn’t be that bad – see where I placed CHSN’s NHL scorebug – but the fact that the space for the score is so wide (wasting some space even when the score hits triple digits) is off-putting, but where this bug really fails is its implementation of foul count and bonus indicators, which remind me of the bad shot counters in hockey but worse because of the imbalance introduced by the bonus indicators.
2nd worst: Tegna/Mavericks. This isn’t that different from a number of other teams that have gone to local broadcast/syndication, and it’s representative of a lot of the problems with them, such as generic fonts that require offputting empty space in the score section until a team hits 100 points, and teeny-tiny timeout and bonus indicators that are unreadable on mobile and hard to read even at close to full size. I think what puts this a step ahead of those graphics are just how generic the fonts are and, more than that, the use of shading for the team logos that make them hard to make out, especially at small sizes.
Worst NBA Scorebug: Sportsnet. Yes, the exact same design that produced one of the best NHL scorebugs produces the absolute worst NBA scorebug. The one change that ruins this scorebug is moving the team abbreviations and score off-center to make room for timeout and bonus indicators in the same area that still don’t make efficient use of the space. It makes it look slapdash and reminds you that basketball is not one of Canada’s favorite sports.
All of these scorebugs, and a number of the dishonorable mentions, have in common poor implementation of timeout and bonus indicators, suggesting that they struggle to reconcile the seeming simplicity that a basketball scorebug should be with these added elements. This was a problem in college too, but that had the added complexity of the possession arrow, foul count being universal because of the two-stage bonus, and in many cases team records. But here, the added problem is that a lot of NBA fans want scorebugs to be out of the way and tucked in the corner – but as we move to the best scorebugs, that might be the wrong approach to handle this. (Notably, the TNT and NBATV scorebugs that are now retired, beloved by many NBA fans, might well have made this section – worse than ESPN, which has so often faltered with its too-big NBA scorebugs – if TNT had kept NBA rights.)
Dishonorable mentions: TSN, Arizona’s Family Sports/Suns, Rip City Television Network/Blazers, GCSEN/Pelicans.
Best NBA Scorebugs
3rd best: Prime Video. This might be a testament to how disappointing I found the available crop of NBA scorebugs more than anything else, but while my first reaction to this scorebug was not positive – specifically the awkwardness and asymmetry of having the score lower and smaller than the team records to make room for the quarter and clocks – it grew on me as I saw more of it, including full highlight packages. (The NBA is the only one of the traditional major sports that doesn’t have recent full games on YouTube, either on its own account or as ripped games on other accounts, and that may have hurt it when we get to the New Scorebug category.) The main important elements are very clear, the centered and compact nature of the scorebug that doesn’t take up much horizontal space might be especially well-suited to center-cut pan-across-the-broadcast social-media highlights, and both of the NBA’s new national partners seem to be determined to show a better way for ESPN to implement the always-on space for stats, and more recently timeout/bonus indicators, that their NBA scorebugs have been obsessed with for over 15 years now.
2nd best: NBC. Speaking of which… there’s a lot about this bug that’s a little too cute. There’s the shading effect on the central element, the fonts used throughout the bug, the design elements such as the jagged lines between the score and team logos and the sideways team abbreviations, the stop-start animations, and the “foam-finger” animation used for 3s that’s okay on a regional scorebug but is just too goofy for a national broadcast that’s going to be showing marquee games and playoff games all the way to the conference finals (and should be getting some NBA Finals, grumble grumble). But in terms of overall layout, this is about as good an implementation of an NBA scorebug as there is.
Best NBA Scorebug: YES Network (Nets). In terms of the best design of an NBA scorebug, though, this gets my top prize. It helps that it starts on a great base, as we’ll see when we get to the next sport, but while its implementation of bonus and timeout indicators isn’t great, with the bonus indicator being sideways at the right side of the team abbreviation space, what makes this stand out in a way other broadcasters should learn from is that it doesn’t let the need to accommodate those things ruin the whole bug. They come out only when needed and take whatever space is available, sticking to the basic simplicity that a basketball scorebug should be. Throw in how bold and readable the whole thing is and you have a recipe for the best scorebug in the sport.
Honorable mentions: None. Hey, I said the state of NBA scorebugs was dire; Prime Video might not even have made the honorable mentions if there were any other better scorebugs. FanDuel and ESPN were okay, but not good enough to be truly worthy of note, though I might have been more forgiving if this wasn’t the very first sport I assessed.
MLB
Worst MLB Scorebugs
3rd worst: Rangers Sports Network. The main problem with this bug is just how disorganized it is. The score is at the far ends of the bug so it’s hard to compare, the count and outs are on opposite sides of the diamond which can be tricky to make look natural and results in an asymmetry between the smaller count and the larger out count, and the pitch count and batter info get a separate box on the right side of the screen rather than being integrated into the scorebug in any way, with the pitch clock, pitch speed, and exit velocity popping out of it in different ways. It feels like a bunch of different ideas were thrown at it one after the other in a haphazard way.
2nd worst: MLB Productions. Please, for the love of God, do not tell me that this is going to be the future of local baseball broadcasts in the post-RSN era. Please tell me that ESPN taking over MLB.TV means that MLB-produced local games will use ESPN’s graphic, which I don’t even like. The MLB Network scorebug had long been haphazardly laid out but at least had an interesting font, but now it uses an incredibly generic font that also manages to be too big. It’s just not a pleasing bug to look at, and I really hope MLB is working on something better as their plans to take over local distribution for all teams advance.
Worst MLB Scorebug: Space City Home Network (Astros). I always felt the old AT&T Sportsnet scorebug was okay but really showed its age in later years as new elements, such as always-on shot count in hockey, were haphazardly added to it. On the last network still using the AT&T scorebug, this has proven especially acute in baseball, where two different elements have been crammed in there since the AT&T bug debuted. Replacing the network logo with the pitch clock is not a great implementation by any means, but the real problem is the batter info, where the AT&T scorebug turned out to be a victim of bad timing. Always-on pitch count was relatively new when the AT&T scorebug debuted and integrating it into the scorebug in this way, sharing a line with the count, made some degree of sense even if not having the count and the outs together was off-putting, but it meant that it was difficult to align the hitter’s performance with the pitch count in a natural way. So not only did AT&T and later SCHN not even try, they allowed it to display in a completely different style, and at least on SCHN, spelled out the hitter’s full name and number while allowing the pitcher to stick with just his last name. At least SCHN rolled out a new scorebug all their own when NBA season rolled around, but, well, let’s just say it’s not an improvement.
Dishonorable mentions: Apple TV, FanDuel Sports Network, CHSN/White Sox, TBS, pretty much anything that’s not at least an honorable mention. Yeah, the state of scorebugs here is pretty dire too, although the top end is better than the NBA. I didn’t even mention Fox and I think that bug is woefully unworthy for something as big as the World Series.
Best MLB Scorebugs
3rd best: Sportsnet (Blue Jays). Well, two out of three ain’t bad. This might actually be the best of the Sportsnet scorebugs, avoiding even my quibbles with the NHL scorebug and going with a clean, simple look that incorporates all the information you need in an intuitive fashion. Bonus points for perhaps the best integration of the pitch clock that doesn’t just replace the pitch count with it (though I still think having a physical pitch clock behind home plate would have been best for all of MLB’s partners).
2nd best: SportsNet Pittsburgh (Pirates). For whatever reason, Fenway Sports Group introduced a bug for one of their RSNs this year that they never introduced to the one airing the team they actually own. The NESN scorebug is fine but bland and a bit haphazard; this one actually manages to spruce it up with some color and team logos, whch I think also gives it the edge over Sportsnet. The arrangement of elements on the right side is still a bit haphazard, but the ideas are there.
Best MLB Scorebug: YES Network (Yankees). With how popular the Yankees are, I almost feel like this is the true most iconic scorebug in the sport. Not for nothing did my attempt at creating an in-house MLB scorebug end up looking like a larger version of this one – in large part because the font used for MLB’s StatCast graphics, which appear to be the same across all broadcasts, seems to be the same one used on this scorebug for everything but the score. But it’s also a testament to just how intuitive and natural everything is with pitcher and batter info directly beneath the teams, which I’m a bit surprised isn’t more popular, I’m guessing because it would force the bug to take up too much horizontal space. The only other scorebugs I can think of that do that are ESPN (which might be my pick for the best scorebug by a national broadcaster) and FanDuel Sports Network, and I don’t think they quite work because they’re extensions of the bug, causing them to take a weird shape, with ESPN having the added problem that because the pitch count gets a separate space, having a space to display the pitcher name feels superfluous. My one tiny quibble is that the perspective effect on the bases might be overdoing things a little, but that’s a very minor quibble. If MLB wants to design a new in-house scorebug for their self-produced broadcasts, they could do worse than take their cues from this.
Honorable mentions: MASN, NESN.
College football
As mentioned earlier, any broadcaster of any FBS game that is not a single school’s in-house production was eligible for these awards.
Worst College Football Scorebugs
3rd worst: Fox. This doesn’t have the same bulkiness problem as Fox’s college basketball scorebug, but it’s way too flippant and unserious for the lead broadcast partner of one of the two remaining truly major college football conferences that regularly airs Ohio State-Michigan. Can you imagine college football playoff games using a scorebug like this? The box for quarter, time, play clock, and down and distance being slightly slanted is something that’s particularly haunted me since the day this scorebug debuted. Not a good sign that this is only third worst.
2nd worst: NBC. I said that the Peacock college basketball scorebug was bulky and the Fox college football one wasn’t, yet this is effectively the same bug as the college basketball one and it might actually take less vertical space than the Fox one. The central element feels more natural than the college basketball scorebug, but that comes at the expense of the space for down-and-distance feeling awkwardly tacked on as on the NFL scorebug. An element I didn’t mention for college basketball that becomes apparent for college football is how weirdly team rankings interact with it and how the justification of team names and records isn’t always consistent as a result.
Worst College Football Scorebug: CBS. I didn’t consider CBS’ regular college basketball scorebug to be as bad as Peacock/NBC’s, so I can’t help but wonder if my impression of it here was degraded by the black color used for Oregon on this game, the one I used to assess it, resulting in all the texture being lost on their part of the scorebug. It’s still plenty bad in its own right, though, with the terrible bland-yet-bulky font and the somewhat awkward placement of team records that at least works better here than it did for the NFL where teams were given less space.
Dishonorable mention: NBCS Bay Area/San Jose State.
Best College Football Scorebugs
3rd best: ESPN (SEC). This scorebug was a breath of fresh air when it debuted for SEC on ABC games last year, and I considered the implementation of a similar layout for non-SEC regular season games to be more than a little disappointing. But when I assessed it for this project, I was actually a little underwhelmed about how it looked on mobile; it might be bulkier than you would ordinarily appreciate. That it still makes the top three is more a testament to how bad the state of college football scorebugs is than anything else.
2nd best: KNSN (Nevada). The state of college football scorebugs may be dire, but this is still way better than a scorebug for a local television station producing games for a mid-major school has any right to be. The use of a generic font, eh, you get what you pay for and the use of a narrow variant helps make it look less generic. But the layout, the use of parallelograms, everything just looks more professional than you’d ordinarily expect from an operation this small – though it helps that the station is branded and set up as a pseudo-regional sports network for the Reno area. (For the record, the timeout indicators are on the right side of the team logos.)
Best College Football Scorebug: ESPN/TNT Sports (College Football Playoff). It’s almost unfair to hold other scorebugs to the standard of this one because a big part of what works about this one is its very low profile when other ESPN college football scorebugs have to make room for the BottomLine, which takes as much if not more space on its own than this scorebug. (The down-and-distance, quarter, and clocks are arranged and formatted similarly on ESPN’s non-SEC scorebug, but the bug as a whole takes up more vertical space, resulting in wasted space around the quarter and clocks.) And simply copying this scorebug wholesale for regular season games might not work when part of what makes this scorebug work is the gravitas and majesty it lends to playoff games. (At the least, the hexagonal motif for down-and-distance and timeout indicators evokes both the CFP logo and a bracket, which wouldn’t quite work outside that context.) Still, I feel like there are lessons to be learned from this scorebug that the vast majority of college football scorebugs would do well to take to heart.
Honorable mentions: None. Seriously, even the SEC on ESPN scorebug wouldn’t even be an honorable mention if there were any better scorebugs, and unlike earlier I can’t even think of any near-honorable mentions for me to bring up here that I don’t still have serious problems with. Maybe the one used on WFSB’s production of a single UConn game? I think TNT’s regular-season scorebug actually works significantly better than their college basketball one but it’s still not great.
NFL
As with motorsports, the small number of contenders in this category means I’m only going to spotlight a single best and worst, plus dishonorable and honorable mentions.
Worst NFL Scorebug: Netflix. You probably thought this was going to go to Fox, didn’t you? I’ll get to my thoughts on the Fox graphic in a bit, but this would have been potentially the worst scorebug in the sport last year, and while it’s improved in some ways – moving the play clock to the bottom area next to the game clock instead of replacing the “N” in the center with it, getting rid of team records so the abbreviations can be bigger – it’s not enough to overcome some of the more fundamental conceptual issues with it. The bigger abbreviations just make the scorebug look vaguely amateurish, pointing to a more fundamental design flaw. The big problem is that the concave shape of the bug has the effect of understating the score, the most important element of any scorebug, while giving inflated importance to the team logos that the use of abbreviations – at a time when NBC and NFL Network are the only other partners left using them – render redundant. Say what you will about the Fox bug, it knows what’s actually important. Dishonorable mentions: Fox, NFL Network.
Best NFL Scorebug: CBS. Do I have a bias for scorebug concepts that resemble what I came up with for leaguewide in-house graphics? Maybe. I do have some quibbles with this graphic; the team logos could stand to be bigger and fill the frame more (the Scorebugwatch Twitter account dinged scorebugs for cutting off the logos but I actually prefer that) and overall the elements aren’t quite spaced the way I prefer, but after the ugly scorebug CBS rolled out at last year’s Super Bowl, give them credit for changing course and bringing their scorebug up to date, honestly to a greater degree than they might have done without their previous disaster, with a simple yet appealing and functional scorebug that could be a model for other networks. Honorable mentions: NBC, YouTube.
New Scorebugs of 2025
Worst New Scorebugs
3rd worst: Fox NFL. Watching this bug on its own, I think it’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, but watching it at the same time as a bunch of other scorebugs kind of puts it in perspective. On its own, it feels like something a low-budget public access station might put together, and then I see actual low-budget scorebugs and it puts into perspective how professional this actually looks. I actually like the idea of a backgroundless scorebug in theory – if I had a “scorebug innovation” award it would go to Fox – but the execution didn’t really work, not helped by a haphazard layout, the awkward way team records and timeout indicators are crammed next to each other, and the weird method of showing possession that only applies when the down and distance isn’t on screen, and the font they created to imitate the Fox logo isn’t particularly appealing either. If they’d stuck with the implementation they used at the Super Bowl, with team abbreviations on colored backgrounds next to scores on no background, it would be more of a contender for both Worst top spots, but at the same time getting rid of those helped make the timeout indicators worse and means there’s nothing associating the team without the ball with a color.
2nd worst: WTA. How do you come up with a worse scorebug than Fox’s NFL scorebug? One way is to make everything too narrow and too small. A legitimate complaint about the Fox scorebug is that the score could be potentially invisible during a snow game or against a white jersey, but in my experience that wasn’t that big of an issue, especially with the subtle black gradient near the bottom of the screen and drop shadow on the score itself. Indeed, I would argue that one thing you can say for the Fox scorebug is that you can’t miss what the score is. If you look at the Fox graphic thumbnail, even at reduced size you can read not only the score, but the time, quarter, and down and distance as well. Can you figure out what’s going on in this thumbnail without pulling it up at full size?
Worst New Scorebug of 2025: TNT college basketball. But even with the WTA and Fox scorebugs, you can see how someone might have thought they might be appealing even if they turned out not to be in practice. This one should have been sent back to the drawing board from the start. It feels like they threw a bunch of elements together without regard for how they would come across. I pointed out most of the flaws with this earlier, but I think this could at least have been passable with a few design tweaks. Normalizing the font sizes and positioning of the central element would have helped, but I think the one thing this graphic needs above all else is having a dedicated space for foul and possession arrow info, rather than cramming it in beneath the team name, without any lines or anything to differentiate the space, and shrinking it as a result. With a few changes it could at least be better than ESPN’s graphic and potentially be a contender for one of the best scorebugs in the sport, certainly among major/power-conference broadcasters, but as it stands I continue to dread the prospect of this being a new March Madness graphic.
Dishonorable mention: Space City Home Network/Rockets. Yes, the state of NBA scorebugs is so dire that a scorebug that didn’t even make its sport’s dishonorable mentions very nearly beat out the Fox NFL scorebug to be featured here.
Best New Scorebugs
3rd best: CFL on TSN. Call me a curmudgeon, but one of my picks for Best New Scorebug is one that I’m not entirely in love with. But that’s for reasons that might derive from my lack of familiarity with the culture of the sport compared to the version I’m familiar with. Taken on its own, this is a testament to how well a relatively simple scorebug can work when you don’t try to overcomplicate things.
2nd best: Wimbledon. Same here; in fact all three of my Best winners are, in their own ways, testaments to simplicity and not overcomplicating things, which is arguably the reason my honorable mention didn’t break into the top three. That’s something TNT obviously failed at, but comparing this to a counterpart in the same sport, it’s kind of something the WTA failed at as well, even though its scorebug is if anything simpler (if only by virtue of involving fewer colors). But the WTA went with too narrow a font, whereas Wimbledon went with a very regular font befitting of its Britishness. I ding scorebugs for using fonts that are too generic, but Wimbledon went with a plain font that still managed to stand out and say something about itself, whereas the WTA tried too hard to impress and advance its #brand with its font choice and ended up sacrificing practicality in the process.
Best New Scorebug of 2025: CBS NFL. This isn’t as simple as the Wimbledon scorebug or even the CFL scorebug given the subtle flourishes on the end caps, but some of the comments I made about the Wimbledon scorebug help explain why this gets the nod over them. The Wimbledon scorebug excels by staying out of the way, but especially in the NFL, you need to do something to stand out in some way. The layout of the bug isn’t the most basic thing in the world – Amazon arguably stood out when it first laid out an NFL scorebug this way a few years ago – but CBS has arguably come close to perfecting it by making it feel normal through its use on a regular Sunday afternoon broadcast, and through the use of relatively plain fonts and keeping the graphical flourishes to a minimum. I’m not sure it’s the best scorebug in all of sports, or even the best that an NFL scorebug could be, but if my mockup of an all-encompassing NFL scorebug is any indication, it might be close to the Platonic ideal of what an NFL scorebug should be. Considering NBC’s contribution to the production of Amazon’s games, it’s a little disappointing that the scorebug they rolled out for the playoffs and Super Bowl this year didn’t take after it, but more on that next year.
Honorable mention: NBA on NBC.