Frequently Asked Questions

SportsRec ranks every live sports game by excitement and stakes, so you can answer the question: what game should I watch tonight? Every game on our slate gets a 0-100 score that reflects how worth watching it is. You'll see Must-Watch games (78+) at a glance, with full spoiler-free recommendations for the rest. Think of it as a curated viewing guide for the day's slate—no scrolling through box scores to figure out which game was the one.

Yes—but we do more. We not only score every game, we're careful not to spoil results for you. Thuuz scored live games on a 0-100 scale and shut down in 2021 when Stats Perform acquired the technology. SportsRec covers basketball and soccer, is free with no account required, and is spoiler-free by default: scores, outcomes, and win-probability charts stay hidden until you tap Reveal.

Those apps are great for scores, news, and stats. SportsRec does two things none of them do: rank every game by how exciting it is, so you know what to watch, and show you that ranking spoiler-free. No accounts, no ads, no news feed—just an answer to which game is worth your time tonight.

Every game gets a 0-100 score that combines two things: importance (what's at stake) and excitement (how dramatic it actually was). Scheduled games are scored on importance alone—team quality, rankings, standings implications, rivalry, national TV, star matchups. Once a game finishes, we re-score it based on what actually happened: close finishes, comebacks, upsets, overtime. The higher number wins.

Must-Watch (78+): marquee matchups and wild finishes—typically 5-10% of any given day. Interesting (55-77): solid games with real stakes. Meh (35-54): nothing special on paper. Diehard Only (below 35): only worth it if it's your team.

Close games, big comebacks, late-game drama, tight spreads, tournament stakes, rivalry matchups, and upsets all push a game up. A Sweet Sixteen overtime thriller scores far higher than a regular-season blowout between top-10 teams. We track the full win-probability curve—so a game that stays a coin flip into the final minute is rewarded far more than one that was decided early.

Soccer needs its own approach. There's no reliable win-probability curve the way there is in basketball, goals are rare, and in knockout competitions it's aggregate (two-leg total) that decides who advances—not any single match result. So we model it differently: we track how dramatically each moment shifted who was likely to win or advance, weight near-miss chances (shots on target, blocked shots, woodwork, disallowed goals) by how plausible they were and how much they would have mattered, and factor in the stakes of the broader competition. The highest-scoring matches are ones with both good action AND consequential stakes—we dampen 0-0 results, and a friendly between top sides won't crack the top of the slate no matter how wide open the play.

Stakes matter a lot. NBA playoff games start with a higher floor than the regular season, and that floor rises each round—Round 1 games start higher than February games, Conference Finals higher still, and Game 7s and the NBA Finals hit the top of the scale almost by definition. March Madness, the NCAA Women's Tournament, Champions League knockout ties, and World Cup Qualifying deciders all get similar treatment. The pre-game score will be higher for these matchups, but if a game turns out to be a dud, the final score still drops to reflect what actually happened.

Scheduled games get a projected score based on importance alone. After tipoff (or kickoff), the score updates live. Once the final whistle blows, the score settles based on what actually happened. Two top-ranked teams in a blowout will drop. An overtime thriller between unranked teams will climb.

For completed basketball games, we analyze the win-probability curve to find the most exciting stretch and give you a timestamp. Skip the slow first half; start where it gets good. No score context, no hint about who's winning—just a moment marker.

Everything is behind two layers of protection. Game cards show only the matchup and excitement tier — no scores, no outcomes. Tap a game to expand it and see a spoiler-free recommendation. Then only when you explicitly tap Reveal do you see the final score, win probability chart, and full details. The two-tap design means you won't accidentally spoil a game just by scrolling past it.

The tier gives you a sense of whether the game was worth watching — a Must-Watch was likely a great game, and a Diehard Only probably wasn't. But it doesn't reveal the score, who won, or what happened. Since high scores can come from a variety of factors — a tight finish, an overtime, a huge upset, a star performance, or just two elite teams in a close one — you can't pin down exactly what's driving the rating. You'll always go in with some uncertainty, which is the point.

Mute push notifications from ESPN, Bleacher Report, The Score, and any other sports apps — they all push scores by default. Avoid Twitter/X and Reddit until you've checked your tiers. Check SportsRec first, queue up the Must-Watch games, then go dark until you've watched them.

College basketball (men's and women's, every D-I game), the NBA and WNBA, and soccer—including the UEFA Champions League, the English Premier League, and FIFA World Cup Qualifying across all six confederations. NFL and college football are also part of the feed. Basketball and soccer are the most deeply modeled.

Yes. SportsRec supports the UEFA Champions League (league phase and knockouts with advancement odds), the English Premier League (with full title race, UCL qualification, Europa, and relegation probability tracking), FIFA World Cup Qualifying across Europe, South America, CONCACAF, Asia, Africa, and Oceania, and the FIFA World Cup itself. Club and national team games both have their own excitement models.

Analytics-based predictive rankings that account for strength of schedule, offensive and defensive efficiency, and tempo—not just win-loss records. These are combined with the AP Top 25 poll for name recognition. Both factor into matchup importance scoring.

For leagues and knockout competitions with table or bracket implications, we run thousands of Monte Carlo simulations of the rest of the season (or the rest of the round) to estimate each team's probability of finishing 1st, qualifying for European competitions, getting relegated, or advancing to the next round. A matchday where a lot of probability can swing is a higher-stakes matchday, and the games on it score higher. A dead-rubber final matchday—where nothing is at stake—is dampened.

Game scores, schedules, and live data come from ESPN. Betting lines come from a combination of The Odds API, ESPN's embedded odds, and model-based predictions. College basketball rankings use public analytics data. Club soccer ratings come from public Elo systems. All data is processed in real-time.

During live games, scores update every 30 seconds. Completed games are scored immediately after they finish. Past dates are cached so they load instantly.

Yes — everything on the site is currently free. No account, no login, no ads. Works in any browser and you can install it as an app. Down the road we may explore premium features for power users, but the core experience of finding which games are worth watching will always be free.

Yes. On iPhone, open sportsrec.app in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. On Android, Chrome will prompt you to install automatically. SportsRec is also available on the iOS App Store. All versions are free.

Thuuz Sports was a game-excitement rating app that scored live games on a 0-100 scale. Stats Perform acquired the technology in late 2020 and shut down the consumer app in February 2021. SportsRec is built for the same audience, but from scratch and with a different approach: spoiler-free by default, a basketball model grounded in win-probability curve analysis, and a soccer model built specifically around what makes soccer different—stakes, advancement, and near-miss drama rather than score-by-score action. Many Thuuz users land on SportsRec when searching for a replacement.