Rules
Everything on this page is rendered from the same file the scoring engine reads, so what is posted here and what the leaderboard computes can never drift apart.
Before the season starts
- Picks are due before kickoff of the first game — . No picks, no entry.
- Payment is due by the end of Week 1 — Monday, September 14. The entry fee is $50 per entry.
The simplest way to pay is Venmo — scan the code with your phone's camera, or use the link. Both go straight to the commissioner:
@Brian-Moore-4 on Venmo
The basics
Everyone pays $50 and picks 4 teams for the whole season. With 3 entries in, the pot is $150, paid out 50% / 30% / 20% to the top 3. Highest total after the Super Bowl wins.
Every team carries a leveling factor — a handicap set from last season's record. Each win pays that team's leveling factor, so a win by a bad team is worth more than a win by a good one. The whole game is finding teams the handicap underrates.
Scoring
| Event | Points | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Regular-season win | LF | the team's leveling factor |
| Regular-season tie | 0.5 × LF | an NFL game can end level; it pays that fraction of a win |
| Division winner | +3.0 | seeds 1–4 |
| Wild-card berth | +1.5 | seeds 5–7 — a team gets this or the division bonus, never both |
| Wild-card round win | +1.0 flat | only when a wild card beats a division winner, and no leveling factor is added. Seeds 2–4 host that round and are always division winners, so a division winner that wins its own wild-card game scores nothing for it. |
| Divisional round win | +1.0 + LF | |
| Conference championship win | +1.5 + LF | |
| Super Bowl win | +2.0 + LF | neutral site |
Leveling factors
| Division | Teams |
|---|---|
| AFC East | NE · 1.10 BUF · 1.45 MIA · 2.00 NYJ · 2.50 |
| AFC North | BAL · 1.85 PIT · 1.70 CIN · 2.15 CLE · 2.30 |
| AFC South | JAX · 1.30 HOU · 1.45 IND · 1.85 TEN · 2.50 |
| AFC West | KC · 2.15 LAC · 1.60 DEN · 1.20 LV · 2.50 |
| NFC East | PHI · 1.45 DAL · 2.20 WAS · 2.40 NYG · 2.50 |
| NFC North | DET · 1.75 GB · 1.60 MIN · 1.75 CHI · 1.45 |
| NFC South | CAR · 2.00 TB · 2.00 ATL · 2.00 NO · 2.30 |
| NFC West | SEA · 1.10 LAR · 1.25 SF · 1.25 ARI · 2.60 |
Two things worth knowing
Your own teams will play each other
Almost every four-team entry has games where two of its own teams meet. One of them has to win, so those points are already yours before kickoff — that is the hatched part of the bar on the standings page, and it is why nobody's floor is simply what they have banked.
A team's maximum
The most any single team can be worth is 20 × LF + 7.5: seventeen regular-season wins, a division title, and three playoff wins. Winning the division rather than a wild-card spot is worth exactly 0.5 more over a full playoff run.
What the words mean
Every term the site uses that means something specific here. The same definitions sit behind the buttons wherever these words appear.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Leveling factor | A team's handicap, set from last year's record. A regular-season win pays the winning team's own leveling factor — so a win by a bad team is worth more to you than a win by a good one, and the loser's factor never enters into it. |
| Banked | Points already scored, from games that have finished. Nothing here is projected, and nothing here can be taken away. |
| Points generated | Everything this team has scored for each entry holding it: leveling-factor points from wins, a division or wild-card berth bonus, and any playoff-win points already earned. |
| Floor | The lowest this entry can still finish on: everything banked, plus anything left that they cannot avoid scoring. |
| Ceiling | The highest this entry could still finish on — every remaining game won by the team you want, and the best possible January. It is a limit, not a forecast; nobody finishes on their ceiling. |
| Still on the table | Ceiling minus floor: how much of this entry's finish is still genuinely undecided. |
| On the table | The most the whole pool could bank in this week. Only sides somebody actually holds are counted, so a game nobody in the pool is on adds nothing — it cannot pay anyone. |
| Locked in | Points the field cannot avoid banking this week. When one entry holds both sides of a game, a team they own has to win it, so those points are already spoken for whatever happens. |
| Pool has a side | Games where somebody in the pool holds at least one of the two teams. The rest cannot move the standings by a single point. |
| Swing | How much a game actually moves the standings. When a team half the pool owns wins, half the pool rises together and the order barely changes — so swing measures only the part that separates people. A game the whole field is on one side of scores zero. |
| Drama | Pool swing multiplied by how uncertain the NFL result is, then scaled so the slate's biggest game is 100. A close game matters only when its result can separate the pool. |
| Leverage | The leveling factor this entry holds that nobody else does. Shared teams lift everyone at once; you only gain ground on the field with teams nobody else has. |
| Share | How much of an entry's banked total came from the team shown. It is that team's points divided by all the points the entry has banked so far. |
| Bye | A week a team does not play. Every NFL team takes one during the regular season, and a team on its bye cannot score you anything — so a week with two of your four teams off is a quiet one. |
| Eliminated | Cannot finish first any more: even this entry's ceiling is below somebody else's floor. |
| The pot | Every $50 entry added together — $150 this season, and the whole of it is paid out to the top 3. |
| Chance of winning | How often this entry finishes first across every simulated season. This is the chance of winning the pool outright — it is not the chance of making money, which is a much easier bar. |
| Chance of cashing | How often this entry finishes somewhere that pays — the top 3. An entry can be very likely to cash and still unlikely to win, which is why both numbers are on the page. |
| Expected payout | The average of what this entry gets paid across every simulated season — each prize weighted by how often they finish in that place. It is a long-run average and not a cheque anybody will ever be handed: the real outcome is one of the actual prizes, or nothing at all. |
| Expected profit | Expected payout minus the $50 entry. Positive means the entry is worth more than it cost. Across the whole pool these add up to zero, because the pot is exactly what everyone paid in — one entry only shows a profit at another's expense. |
| Projected final score | Where this entry's final total landed across every simulated season: the middle of the range, and the band that eight seasons out of ten fell inside. |
| Head to head | How often one entry finishes above another with everybody else ignored. It is a straight two-horse race, so a pair of opposite cells always adds to 100%. |
| Simulated seasons | The model plays the rest of the season out thousands of times, holding every completed game fixed, and counts how often each thing happens. Anything drawn from it is cyan, so a forecast is never mistaken for something that already happened. |
| Game win chance | How often this team wins this game in the model's simulated seasons. It is an NFL outcome forecast, not the chance that an entry wins the pool. |