NFL pick'em
An NFL pick'em pool where picking the winners is the easy part and getting everyone's picks in before kickoff is the actual job. Eighteen weeks, 272 games, locks that follow kickoff and reminders that land before the early window. Your logo, your colors, your domain.
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Thursday Night Football is the first lock of the week. The full slate is already in your hub with kickoff times in each player's own time zone and a countdown on every game, so nobody in Denver is working out what 8:15pm Eastern means.
Most of the week kicks off in the Sunday early and late windows, and the early window locks before a West Coast player has finished breakfast. This is the part that breaks office pools. A reminder 24 hours out lands on Saturday, when people are still thinking about football rather than brunch.
Monday Night Football closes the week. Results score as each game ends, the standings move in real time, and the recap is waiting on Tuesday morning while the office is there to read it and argue about it.
Almost nothing that goes wrong in an NFL pick'em pool is about the picks. It is about the calendar: a week that runs Thursday to Monday, byes that change its size, and a playoff run that is worth nothing unless you decide otherwise.
Thursday Night Football kicks off three to four days before the Monday night game. A single weekly deadline set at the Thursday kickoff locks people out of most of the week's football. Per-game locks are the right default. If you want one deadline because your pool is casual, set it at the first Sunday kickoff and leave the Thursday game out of the pool entirely, rather than scoring a game nobody could pick.
The Sunday early window locks at 1:00pm Eastern, which is 10:00am on the West Coast. A pool that assumes everyone picks over Sunday coffee loses its Pacific players by October. Per-game locks plus a reminder 24 hours out are what stop a national pool from quietly shedding half a time zone.
Sixteen games in a full week, fourteen when four clubs are out, thirteen in the heaviest bye week. Straight pick'em absorbs that without anyone noticing. A confidence ladder does not: the top rung is worth 16 one week and 13 the next unless you renumber. Decide whether the ladder shrinks with the slate or the point values stay fixed, and say which before Week 1.
The playoffs run single elimination across four weekends: six Wild Card games, then four, then two, then one. Scored as ordinary weeks, the Conference Championships and the Super Bowl are worth almost nothing and your pool ends with a whimper. Either weight the later rounds upward, run the 14-team bracket as its own pool, or close the season at Week 18 and start something new in January.
A winner in every game, up to sixteen a week, eighteen weeks. The default, and the only format that survives an office where half the field could not name a starting quarterback.
Rank every game in the week by how sure you are, from 16 down to 1. It rewards the people who actually watch, and it is the format most affected by bye weeks shortening the slate.
One team a week, never twice, one wrong call and you are out. Thirty-two teams against eighteen weeks means running out of teams is almost never what ends you. Bye weeks taking four or six clubs off the board is what actually does it.
Fourteen teams, thirteen games, four weekends, ending in Atlanta on February 13, 2028. Fill it out once in January and run it as a separate pool for the people who never picked a regular-season week.
Every game shows its kickoff in the reader's local time with a live countdown, and reminders are timed from the lock, so they move with it. A pool that spans New York, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles runs on one set of locks without anyone doing the arithmetic.
Your logo, your colors, your domain on every screen and every email. Pro and above run on a custom domain with a custom email sender, so the Tuesday recap arrives from you and nobody sees a Fanzava logo at any point in eighteen weeks.
Thursday night to Monday night is a long week to hold open. Games lock individually at kickoff, so the Thursday game closes on its own and the Monday night game stays open until it starts. One missed deadline costs one game, not the week.
Split your pool into groups by office, department or division allegiance. Group leaderboards run alongside the overall one, and the Banter Board keeps the Tuesday morning argument somewhere other than your inbox.
Free to start. No credit card.