You might think the Chiefs were the biggest loser in the Super Bowl, on account of getting blown out basically the entire game, but I’m not so sure that’s true.

They won the last two Super Bowls and will have a chance to try and reset and grow in a different way this off-season. Taylor Swift also got booed loudly, but that was probably by Eagles fans, many of whom likely had a relative who went to the Eras Tour. Kendrick Lamar also had his share of detractors who didn’t enjoy the halftime performance, but those were counterweighted with a ton of people who liked it. No, I think the biggest loser of the Big Game was actually Fox’s new scorebug, which was ranted about and hated on by fans who almost universally agreed it was a huge step down.

Now, if you’re not a huge sports fan, video editor or a graphic designer, you might be wondering what the heck a scorebug is. Let me explain. The scorebug is the graphic overlay at the bottom of the screen that tells you what the score is. In addition, it typically provides additional pertinent information such as how much time is left and how many timeouts each team has left. Ordinarily, it looks like this…

Fox, however, decided to get a little creative ahead of the Super Bowl and roll out a new version, and it did not go well. To be more blunt about it, people hated it, and they hated it in a really aggressive and loud way. Ordinarily, I’d try and play devil’s advocate and talk about some of the more positive features, but to be honest, I have to agree with the angry horde here. I mean… look at this thing…

To say the comments were negative would be an understatement. At the start of the game, an oblivious FOX social media department dropped a picture of it asking what fans thought of the change, and the response was immediate and very mean-spirited. More than 8,000 fired back. I scrolled through hundreds of comments, and it was hard to find any that were positive. A simple “It’s terrible” from sports media personality Frank The Tank got more than 5,000 likes. A user asking “why’d you tweet this like it was something to be proud of” got more than 4,000 likes. Another dude did a crude Photoshop 1.0 drawing over the screen with his own scorebug and got more than 11,000 likes. Check this out…

That’s just the comments on FOX’s post. Thousands of people dropped their own tweets, and almost all of those were negative too. I found three different popular tweets that included different gifs of people vomiting. One of them had more than 20,000 likes. One asking “What the fuck is this scorebug” had more than 25,000 likes. So, what’s going on?

I think there are really three major problems here. The first is that people don’t like change, and they especially don’t like change in unexpected moments. If Fox would have rolled out this new scorebug at the start of the next NFL season, I’m not saying people would have liked it, but they wouldn’t have felt so shocked. The beginning of the season is a moment where people expect to see alterations in packaging.

Second, there’s not enough cohesion in this graphic. I get what they were going for by letting us see the field in the middle, but those windows just make it look like it’s all disjointed. And finally, the font, both the size and text, are not good. Numerous people on social tweeted about how it looks like an old person’s cell phone, and you can’t unsee that once you hear it.

FOX has a history of rolling out new graphics and changes for the Super Bowl. They also dropped a new graphic in 2020 and fans were a little more mixed. In the time since, they refined it a little bit and made a few subtle tweaks until fans were a lot more on board, to the point where they were so mad they changed it yesterday. I suspect they’ll do the same thing this time, and by next season, we’ll get a version that takes a little of the old, a little of the new and hopefully puts it in a package that isn’t universally hated on. Fingers crossed.