A free browser game built overnight by a Columbus-area software engineer has racked up more than 28 million plays, turning a side project into one of the more unlikely viral hits to come out of central Ohio this year. The game, called 20-0, challenges players to draft the greatest football team of all time and see if they can pull off a perfect season.
Nick Baumeyer, who is based in the Columbus suburb of Hilliard, created 20-0 as an overnight side project, according to Axios. Gameplay starts with a wheel spin that locks in a random all-time NFL team and era, and players then draft available athletes into position slots, weighing star power against roster gaps before an automated simulation plays out the season, per Sports Mini Games. Baumeyer built the game using full-stack development, cloud architecture and modern development tools, and it has now become a viral hit played millions of times, according to WSYX.
Why 20-0 Is the Magic Number
The title refers to the exact win total needed for a truly flawless modern NFL campaign. Under the 17-game regular season the league adopted in 2021, an undefeated team must win all 17 regular-season games plus three playoff games to reach 20-0, according to Pro-Football-Reference. No team has ever done it. The 1972 Miami Dolphins remain the only franchise to finish a season completely unblemished, going 17-0 by winning 14 regular-season games and three postseason games, including Super Bowl VII, per the same source. The 2007 New England Patriots came closer than anyone since, reeling off 18 straight wins before losing Super Bowl XLII and finishing 18-1, missing perfection by a single game.
Baumeyer has an interest in sports analytics and modern technology, and the game reflects that fandom translated into code. WSYX reports the project gave him hands-on experience building, launching, and growing a consumer-facing digital product, skills he had not necessarily set out to test when he started tinkering. What began as one NFL simulator has since ballooned into a lineup covering nine different sports.
Riding a Wave of Roster-Simulator Games
20-0 did not emerge in a vacuum. Its creation was inspired by a broader viral trend in sports roster simulators that began with 82-0 for the NBA, which spurred developer adaptations across baseball, college sports and football, according to Axios. Baumeyer followed his football hit by building 40-0, an all-time college basketball roster drafting and simulation game that has players assembling a squad capable of running the table through an undefeated regular season and an NCAA tournament title, per Sports Mini Games.
Baumeyer's central Ohio roots run deeper than his coding career. Local sports records show he competed on the Hilliard Davidson High School varsity bowling team in 2017, according to the Delaware Gazette. Now he is the Columbus-area software engineer behind a game that has attracted significant attention and players well beyond Ohio.
Could 20-0 Follow Wordle and Immaculate Grid?
Independent sports mini-games have a track record of catching the eye of much bigger players in media and gaming once they hit viral scale. Sports Reference LLC acquired the daily grid game Immaculate Grid in July 2023 after it drew more than 100,000 daily plays, following its creation by an Atlanta engineer, according to Sports Reference. An even bigger precedent came from Wordle, which The New York Times Company purchased in January 2022 for a low-seven-figure sum after the simple word game brought tens of millions of new users to the publication, per Engadget.
Whether 20-0 follows a similar path toward acquisition, or stays a passion project run out of Hilliard, remains an open question. There is also the matter of how closely a game built around real NFL players and historical rosters can brush up against league intellectual property without drawing attention from official sports organizations. For now, Baumeyer's overnight creation keeps racking up plays, one more entry in a growing subculture of web-based sports games that have turned casual coding experiments into national phenomena.
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