Whether it’s in a lecture hall, dining hall or classroom, students enjoy playing online games. The latest trends have been games like Wordle, where you guess a five-letter word and send screenshots to your family members to show how few tries it took you to guess the word. Or, you make it a competition, timing each other to see how long it takes you. For avid sports fans, we want to test our knowledge. Immaculate Grid is a game that sports fans must try, with thousands of grid combinations for sports.
Brian Minter, a software developer from Atlanta, designed a grid of nine blank squares, with each row and column assigned a category. It’s currently run by Sports Reference, featuring grids for baseball, soccer, women’s and men’s basketball, football and hockey.
Sports Reference launched its website in 2000 with baseball-reference.com. President Sean Forman created the company in 2004. After six years working for Saint Joseph’s University, Forman left to work on Sports Reference full-time in May of 2006. In 2007, he loosely affiliated Sports Reference with Pro-Football-Reference and Basketball-Reference.
Adam Darowski, director of product for Sports Reference, said “people are playing this game in so many ways and, quite frankly, I think that’s one of the reasons it’s been so successful.”
All you do is select a player for each of the nine spaces that match the criteria listed on the top three rows and left side. Whether or not you are correct, your choice still counts as a guess and you can’t use any player twice. The goal of the game is to get the lowest score possible.
There are multiple ways a new player can play the grid. The first one is to not worry about your score and just put down popular players that come to mind. You’ll get instant satisfaction filling out the grid and your job is done. For intermediate players, if you have some level of sports knowledge, you can replace famous players with a couple of uncommon players. For the advanced, well, it’s simply a gamble, and you try and think of players who played for both teams that people have never heard of.
Once you name a player with a low percentage, you get this instant euphoric feeling or you kick yourself for selecting the wrong person. It’s entirely up to the player if they want to complete the game for fun or really challenge themselves. Whether you are killing time waiting for a doctor’s appointment or waiting for class to start, Immaculate Grid is what you make of it.
In July, the grid started with just baseball. Forman said in New York Times article: “It’s incredibly rare to have a product that fits with our audience so well, so quickly. We want to build it out on our other sites — basketball and football are no-brainers — and we’re trying to launch those as soon as possible.”
The Immaculate Grid reveals a new three-by-three grid every day. Three teams or accomplishments are listed. You click on one of the boxes and enter a player’s name that matches the criteria. For example: On Feb. 7, the football grid top listings were the Baltimore Ravens, Los Angeles Rams and 1st Team AP All-Pro. On the left side, listings were the Cincinnati Bengals, Los Angeles Chargers and Atlanta Falcons. I had to enter a player who has played at least one game for both teams (Ravens/Bengals, Rams/Chargers and Falcons/Rams). For the First Team AP All-Pro, I had to select a player who was a First Team AP All-Pro in a season that they appeared on the Bengals, Chargers and Falcons. This is what my final results looked like:
Under the show summary section, the nerds calculate your rarity score. In this grid, my rarity score was 357. According to Immaculate Grid, “rarity score is calculated as the sum of the percentages for each cell you get correct plus 100 for each empty cell. A lower score means your answers are more rare. This score will change throughout the day as more games are completed.”
In the “show summary” section, all the stats for the app are shown for this particular grid. They have in-depth answers on other players I could have selected and what the most popular answers were. The other section on accuracy detailed how accurate my picks were compared to other players for any of the spaces.
The Immaculate Grid is a great way to show your passion for sports and to challenge yourself and your friends to see who can create the best grid.