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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.

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