How do football squares work?

What is a football squares grid?

A football squares board is a 10-by-10 grid — 100 squares in total. The two teams playing the game sit on the two axes: one team runs along the top (the columns), the other down the side (the rows). Each of the 100 squares belongs to whoever claimed it.

Before the numbers are drawn, the squares are just blank cells. Players claim squares first; the numbers come later. That order is what keeps it fair — nobody can pick a square because they already know it has good numbers.

How are the numbers assigned?

After the squares are claimed, every row gets a digit from 0 to 9 and every column gets a digit from 0 to 9, each in random order. Now every square sits at the intersection of one row digit and one column digit — that pair is the square's numbers.

Sunday Squares draws the numbers with a sealed, verifiable method: the draw is committed before any square is claimed and revealed at lock, so anyone can check afterward that it wasn't rigged.

How do you win?

At the end of a scoring period, you take the last digit of each team's score. The square where those two digits meet is the winner. Say the score is 17 to 10:

The winning square is the one where the home team's row digit is 7 and the away team's column digit is 0. Whoever holds that square wins that period's prize.

When are winners decided?

Each scoring period is its own drawing. A common setup pays a winner at the end of every quarter, with the final score paying the most. Simpler raffles pay only on the final score, and marquee games (like the Super Bowl or playoffs) often add a halftime winner so there are more prizes.

That means one square can lose in the first quarter and still win at the half or the final — every period is a fresh chance based on that period's score.

What makes it a raffle instead of a bet?

In a Sunday Squares raffle, the squares are raffle tickets. Tickets are sold in person, the winning tickets are determined by the football score, and the proceeds benefit a nonprofit cause — so it runs as a charitable raffle under state charitable-gaming rules, not as a sportsbook. There are no bets and no odds; the score does the drawing.

What happens to an unsold square?

If a winning square was never sold, there's no phantom winner. In a Sunday Squares raffle, an unsold winning ticket's prize simply rolls to the cause — the fundraiser keeps that money instead of paying it out.