Powerball and the NFL are launching a new $5 weekly lottery game

Powerball and the NFL are launching Powerball Xs & Os, a weekly $5 draw game where players pick eight NFL team logos from all 32 teams and eight logos are drawn at random every Sunday night. Sales begin September 8, 2026, with the first drawing on September 13.

The prize structure is published in full, so we can say what the ticket is actually worth.

The fixed prizes return a third of the ticket

Those four tiers are worth $1.66 on a $5 ticket, or 33% of the price. Everything else has to come from the jackpot, which means the jackpot needs to reach about $35.1 million before a $5 play is worth $5 in expected value.

That is a far lower bar than the national game it is named after. Powerball's own jackpot has to pass roughly $491 million before its $2 ticket breaks even, because its jackpot odds are 1 in 292 million against 1 in 10.5 million here. A rolling jackpot on 10.5 million combinations should cross $35 million reasonably often, which makes this the rare lottery game where the break-even point is realistically reachable.

The usual caveats still bite though. That $35.1 million is the advertised figure before any cash-option discount, before tax, and assuming just a single winner, and each of those pushes the real threshold higher.

It wins twice as often as Powerball

Overall odds are 1 in 12.16, against 1 in 24.87 for Powerball. The published figure checks out against the individual tiers, which sum to exactly that.

There is a design choice here worth pointing out, because it runs against the industry norm. The lowest prize is $7 on a $5 ticket, a 40% gain compared to the free ticket lowest prize. Most lottery products put their largest prize tier exactly at the ticket price: across every active US scratch-off we track, 39.6% of all printed prizes simply hand back the same amount what the player paid. Xs & Os has no break-even tier at all, so every win is a win.

The trade is that 33% back from fixed prizes is thin. A $5 scratch-off returns about 69% across its whole prize table. Draw games concentrate value in the jackpot instead, and this one concentrates harder than most.

The prizes are not guaranteed to stay fixed

One line in the rules deserves more attention: "Lower-tier prizes may become pari-mutuel in some circumstances."

That means if an unusual number of tickets hit a tier, the advertised $20,000 or $500 can be replaced by a share of a fixed pool rather than the stated amount. It is standard protection against liability and every multi-state game carries some version of it. It also means the $1.66 figure above is a ceiling in the weeks when it matters most.

The risk is not evenly spread because players pick teams rather than numbers, popular franchises will be wildly over-selected, and a drawing that happens to produce eight heavily-picked logos could put far more winners into a tier than a random-number game ever would. This is the same crowding effect we found with birthday numbers in our look at lottery superstitions, except concentrated by fandom rather than by calendar.

Picking eight unpopular teams does nothing to improve your chance of matching. It improves what you keep if a pari-mutuel tier is triggered.

The teams are decoration

Powerball states it directly: results are randomly drawn and not based on, determined by, or dependent on the outcome of NFL games. A ticket with the eight best teams in the league has exactly the same chance as any other eight logos.

That distinction will be lost on some buyers, which is presumably part of the appeal. Football knowledge feels like it should transfer, and it transfers nothing. Our national study of 65 licensed games found that licensing itself does not make a ticket worse value once you compare like with like, so the NFL branding here is neither a bonus nor a tax. It is a reason to buy.

Where you can play it

Twenty-four jurisdictions at launch, with more expected later in the year: Arizona, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Delaware, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont and West Virginia.

Notably absent are the biggest lottery states. California, Texas, Florida, New York, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan are all missing from the launch list, which caps the size of the jackpot pool and is worth watching, because a rolling jackpot on a small player base grows slowly.

The launch also brings the first national promotional prize program in Powerball history. Entering tickets at the official site earns points that can be assigned to prize drawings, including a trip to Super Bowl LXI and NFL merchandise, at no cost beyond the ticket. Losing tickets qualify, which is the genuinely player-friendly part of the announcement, and it makes a non-winning ticket worth the thirty seconds to enter.

Sources

Powerball: Powerball and the NFL team up for the launch of Powerball Xs & Os