The idea
Most sports trivia asks for the one right answer. YouKnowBall asks questions with dozens or hundreds of right answers, like “Name a player who caught a touchdown pass from Aaron Rodgers”, and scores you on how few other people gave the same one. Anyone can say Davante Adams. Knowing ball is remembering the third-string tight end who caught one in garbage time.
Every day each league (NFL, NBA and MLB) gets one Deep Cut prompt, one Golf course, one Career Path (name a player from the teams they played for) and one Box Score (name them from one game’s stat line), the same for everyone. When the day closes at midnight Eastern, its Board shows every valid answer and how many players named each one, so you find out which of your picks were the deep cuts and which were chalk.
How prompts are made
Each prompt is a question with an exact answer set, computed from the stats rather than written from memory: who threw four touchdowns in a game since 2015, who played for both the Celtics and the Lakers, who homered on Opening Day. Templates run over every franchise, decade, draft class and star, and hand-written prompts add the classics and the oddities.
A prompt only runs if it has between 20 and 300 valid answers: few enough to be gettable, enough that there’s a long tail to dig into. The schedule rotates through kinds of prompts so no two days in a row feel the same, Thursdays are Throwback Thursday (players from before 2000), and holidays get their own: Thanksgiving football, Christmas Day basketball, Fourth of July baseball. Each prompt is labeled Easy, Medium or Hard from how many of its answers are household names.
When you miss, the game tells you why from the same stats, like “Best game since 2015: 3 passing TDs (2016)”. If an answer should have counted, the Feedback button goes straight to a person who can fix it.
The data
NFL stats come from nflverse: game-by-game stats from 1999, rosters back to 1920 and the draft from 1980. NBA stats come from NBA.com box scores, complete from the 1955-56 season. MLB stats come from Retrosheet, which covers the American and National Leagues from 1897 and publishes after each season. How famous each player is, used to score answers early in the day, comes from English Wikipedia pageviews. Full credits and licenses are in the FAQ.
Who’s behind it
YouKnowBall is an independent project made by sports fans. It isn’t affiliated with the NFL, NBA, MLB or any team. It’s free to play, with no account needed; signing in is optional and only keeps your streaks and leagues on every device. Questions, prompt ideas and corrections are welcome through the Feedback button or at [email protected].
New here? Read how scoring works, or play today’s games.