About

A private pool for predicting an NFL season. Pick every game — who wins, and roughly by how much — and the leaderboard scores it as results come in.

How scoring works

Two points are on offer in every game: one for calling the winner, and one more if the margin bucket lands too. The margin only pays on a game you already got right — matching the bucket while having the wrong club win is a coincidence rather than a read.

Picks lock at each game’s individual kickoff rather than at a weekly deadline, so the Thursday game closing does not stop you editing Sunday. Point spreads are shown beside each game as the market’s own read, but nothing is picked or graded against them.

The postseason bonus

When the real bracket plays out, your bracket is paid per club that actually reached each round, doubling as it goes: 2 points for each of your 14 that made the field, 4 for each that reached the divisional round, 8 for a conference championship, 16 for the Super Bowl, and 32 for calling the champion outright.

Because it compounds, a club you had going all the way is worth 62 on its own — it collects at every round on the way there. A perfect bracket is 156, against 544 for a flawless regular season, so January is worth roughly a fifth of the year and can genuinely decide the title. Rounds that have not been played yet count as nothing rather than as misses.

Standings and playoffs

Your picks build your own version of the season. The standings pages apply the league’s published tiebreaking procedure in full — head-to-head, division record, common games, conference record, strength of victory and strength of schedule, and on down — and the bracket seeds four division winners and three wild cards per conference, with the divisional round reseeded the way the real one is.

Two steps of the published procedure are not implemented, because the data to run them does not exist here: net touchdowns (picks record a margin, not a box score) and the final coin toss, which is replaced by a stable alphabetical order so a page does not reshuffle itself on every visit.

Where the data comes from

Schedules, scores, logos and point spreads come from ESPN’s public endpoints. Spreads are whichever book ESPN surfaces, usually DraftKings, and are refreshed until kickoff.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by the National Football League. Point spreads are shown for reference only — this is not a betting site, and no money changes hands.