What key numbers are in the NFL
American football does not score in ones. Points arrive in threes and sevens, so winning margins pile up on those numbers and thin out between them. Those crowded margins are what people mean by key numbers: 3 and 7 above all, then 6, 10 and 14 — the sums you get by adding the first two together.
We do not publish a frequency table
You will find percentages quoted everywhere for how often NFL games land on 3, drawn from various samples and various eras of the rulebook. We do not have a figure of our own and will not repeat somebody else's as though we did. The shape is the part that is useful, and the shape follows from how the sport scores.
Other sports
Basketball scores in ones, twos and threes, so margins spread out and no single number dominates the way 3 does in football. In baseball and hockey the key number is simply 1 — which is exactly why the run line and the puck line sit at 1.5 and almost never move.
None of this makes a game predictable. It explains why a line sits where it does and why moving it costs what it costs, which is a fact about prices, not about outcomes.
The archive
What the published price did in US sports
11,262 games in US sports that are over and carried a price when we wrote them up, between November 24, 2025 and November 6, 2026. Each count sits beside what it is out of, and the share is the one divided by the other.
| What | How often | Out of | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| The shorter price won | 7,058 | 10,936 | 64.5% |
| The favourite covered the handicap | 3,373 | 7,003 | 48.2% |
| The total went over | 5,518 | 11,236 | 49.1% |
| The home side won | 6,361 | 11,262 | 56.5% |
How they ended
Over 16,021 finished games in US sports whose result line says how it ended — the feed's own one-line verdict, not a reading of the play.
| What | How often | Out of | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Went past regulation | 1,212 | 16,021 | 7.6% |
| Settled on a shootout | 161 | 16,021 | 1.0% |
| Called before the end | 9 | 16,021 | 0.1% |
286 games landed exactly on the number — the handicap or the total — so they are in the counts they are out of and in neither result.
The prices counted here are DraftKings', as they stood when we last wrote each game up — one snapshot per game, near kick-off for almost all of them, and never a closing line. So this says what the published line did, not how it moved on the way there.
A season that happened. Nothing here predicts the next game, and none of it is advice.
Counted November 6, 2026.
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