How do Super Bowl Squares Work? Football Squares Rules & Setup

What are Super Bowl Squares?

Super Bowl squares are one of the most popular football games to play during the big game. It is a game for large groups, and there is no knowledge of the Super Bowl or football in general needed to play!

The Super Bowl is when this is the most common, but this can be played with any football (or basketball) game throughout the entire season. This can all be played virtually as well, so you can play with coworkers and loved ones around the world, and only have to pay attention to the final score of the game.

What are Football Squares?

For those who are unfamiliar with football squares, it is essentially picking a square in a 10×10 grid. Each square represents a point total that both teams will have at a certain point in the game (that is determined prior to the start of the game). If at the end of any quarter, half, or full game, the score corresponds to the square that you picked, you win.

How to Set up Super Bowl Squares

Setting up Super Bowl squares is very straightforward. First, you create a 10×10 grid. Each of the two teams playing is assigned to either the x-axis or the y-axis. For the sake of this example, we will use Super Bowl LVI teams, the Los Angeles Rams, and Cincinnati Bengals.

The Rams will go on the y-axis and the Bengals on the x-axis. Both axes have the numbers 0-9 for each row or column, and this is normally populated non-sequentially, as shown below. You can find many printable or editable templates for this online, but you can also create your own grid relatively quickly manually, or on Excel.

Super Bowl Squares Rules

Once the board is set up, each person who is participating is assigned a random square in the grid. You can assign the squares in multiple ways. A couple of common ways are to let people pick their squares BEFORE assigning the numbers on each axis, or randomly assign them for each person (also needs to be done before assigning numbers to avoid any bias).

In most cases, you probably will not find 100 people to fill out the grid, so you can assign multiple squares to one person until you fill out the entire grid. You can also put a monetary value for each square requiring a buy-in and a payout for the correct square. When having buy-ins, people can pay for multiple entries if they want to increase their chances of winning, and that can keep things even in terms of chances to win.

How do You Win Super Bowl Squares?

Let’s take a look back at the grid that we created for Super Bowl LVI. The final score of that game was Rams 23, Bengals 20. That means that the person who has the number 3 on the Rams axis (y-axis) and 0 on the Bengals axis (x-axis), would be the winner! The winning square is highlighted yellow below.

Additionally, standard scoring for Super Bowl squares includes the winners of the first, second and third quarters. The winning square at the end of each quarter would receive 20% of the pot each, and the final score (fourth quarter) would receive the remaining 40%.

This can obviously be changed to whatever payout is preferred. Either way, winners receive a pretty good payout for low risk and generally small odds to win.

Advanced Super Bowl Squares Rules

Of course, with any game like this, fans have created multiple variations and more ways to win. The most common is “touching” squares to the winning score. Those squares will also win money, although the payout is generally much smaller. Other advanced rules include the reverse, so instead of 3 for Rams and 0 for Bengals, it would be 0 for Rams and 3 for Bengals.

Last, numbers are switched at the end of each quarter, which helps keep the same people winning if the score does not change from quarter to quarter.

What are good super bowl squares numbers?

The most common scores for football games usually end in 0, 3 and 7. In the history of the Super Bowl, the four best combinations have been 0-0 (19 times), 0-3 (11 times), 0-7 (11 times), and 7-0 (10 times). Numbers 2, 5, 8 and 9 are typically the numbers one hopes to avoid landing on when getting assigned squares.

Other Considerations for Super Bowl Squares 

If you have the luxury of picking your numbers, try to aim for the ones mentioned above. Those are the most common outcomes and they give you the best chance of winning. In most situations, people will try their best to end up having their squares in the same row or column multiple times.

That way they can spread out their chances to win on multiple numbers. Realistically, Super Bowl squares are extremely variable, so you just have to hope you get lucky when the organizer is drawing squares. More entries give you higher odds to win, so if you want to throw in a few extra dollars to increase your chances, that is doable as well.