I notice many soccer scoreboards and TV display bars are only designed for single digits. What happens in the event that a team scores 10+ goals? Where do they carry over the extra digit?
Same for American football; many scoreboards and TV display bars are only designed for double digits. What happens in the extremely unlikely event that a football team scores 100+ points? Where do they carry over the extra digit?
My Google-Fu informs me that the highest score ever attained by an NFL team in one game is 72, so the possibility of a major league team scoring more than 100 points seems too remote to bother coming up with a contingency plan at this time.
Likewise, the record score in the English Premier League is 9-0 (twice achieved I believe), in nearly 25 years of play. So while a score of 10 is considerably more likely than triple figures in the NFL, it hasn’t happened yet and I don’t think anyone is worrying about what to do if and when it does.
IIRC, this was an issue when Nadia Comaneci won her perfect 10: The scoreboards didn’t have a second digit, and so it ended up displaying as 1.0 .
I spent a few Saturdays this spring working as the scoreboard / clock operator for a minor-league indoor football team, the Chicago Blitz. The arena which hosted their games was originally built as an indoor-soccer arena, and the scoreboard (an old-fashioned one, with the numbers made up of arrays of incandescent light bulbs, very similar to this one) only had two digits for each team’s scores.
In the first home game of the season, Chicago thumped their opponents (Buffalo), and the halftime score was something like 60-0, so I started to worry about how to handle the score hitting 100+. (I suspect that the scoreboard would have “rolled over” the tens and ones digits, and 102 points would have read out as “02”.) It was a moot point, as the Blitz called off the dogs in the fourth quarter, and the final was only something like 83-7.
Just make a 1 out of some construction paper and stick it up there.
Yup, that’s the highest score in a regular season game – a 1966 game between the Redskins and Giants, in which the Giants scored 41, and lost by 31 :D. However, the Bears scored 73 in the 1940 NFL Championship game (shutting out the Redskins in the process).
On the other hand double-digits have been achieved a numerous times (if very rarely) before in English football, including in the league that was to be renamed the Premiership. The last time I can find confirmed for a League game was a 10-0 socre Division3 in 1987
The reality is now that most scoreboards at higher level are really gigantic displays linked to a computer so could easily handle double-digit scores.
At lower level there are scoreboards that can only handle one digit (e.g. Salisbury City who played in the 5th tier of English football before being reformed last season in the 6th tier).
Of course in football the scoreboard is purely for display purposes only and it is the referee who keeps track of the score in their notebook.
Well, 73-0 (the 1940 title game), but yeah.
So what if the leading digit rolls off - everyone involved will know the real score anyway.
During the insane Isner-Mahut match at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships, the courtside scoreboards got stuck at 47-47 in the final set.
And, that’d be the case in American football, as well. The actual score is kept by the officials (and noted by the statistician); the scoreboard in the stadium is just a visual aid.
When I was a kid, a local basketball court seems to have been designed with that in mind. There were only two lighted digits for the score, but there was a peg that could be used to manually hang a board with a “1” on it. I never saw it used, but I did see the boards in the supply closet. It looked professionally made, so I assume the scoreboard manufacturer made it part of the standard equipment.
I’ve never seen a football game hit triple digits… but I have seen a college game hit 63-0 at halftime, before being called on account of rain. Had the weather been better, who knows?
When a game’s a blowout at halftime, there is often a quiet understanding reached by the ref and coaches that the clock will be allowed to run when it shouldn’t, the leading team will keep the ball mostly on the ground to use up time, the bench players will see a lot of time, timeouts will not be called, and so forth. For a leading team to keep its foot on the gas at that point is considered bad sportsmanship, but it does sometimes happen.
Gas stations in the US did that when the price first rose over $1/gallon.
Probably once a year or so each major league baseball team scores 10+ runs in an inning. The the line score on the scoreboard has to put two digits in for one inning. Some scoreboards can handle this. Some probably cannot. But I would guess this is more common that other similar issues that have been mentioned. The most recent time I recall is the Mets vs the Brewers on May 16th.
Canadian ones started charging by the litre instead of the Imperial gallon.
I remember reading a story about that game. IIRC, the Redskins nearly scored on their first possesion (dropped pass or something). Someone asked Sammy Baugh how the game would have been different if they had made that first touchdown. He replied the score would have been 73-7.
There is a rule in some high school associations providing for a running clock if one team is up by a certain number of points in the second half, but it is a formal rule, not a “a quiet understanding.” But you are right that at all levels there is a unwritten but strongly held expectation that, in the case of a blowout, the winning team will not “run up the score.”