How it works · 2026 season
Rebuilding the Pool
OfficeFootballPool got sold. The replacement doesn’t run our format. So I built one that does, and it’s running.
Splash Sports bought OfficeFootballPool and rebuilt it around their own contest formats. Ours isn’t one of them. Rather than bend our rules to fit somebody else’s product, I rebuilt the thing we actually had: a confidence pool, ten picks a week, ranked one through ten, against the spread or the total.
It is up. You sign in, save a card, and it scores itself off the real finals — both pools, standings, a message board, the lot. This page is what it does, and where the house rules landed.
Where it stands
- Live now
- Sign-in, saved cards, auto-scoring, standings, both pools
- This week’s board
- 40 FBS-vs-FBS games, pulled and filtered automatically
- Lines
- Real spreads, totals and kickoff times, no manual typing
- Scoring
- Finals land on their own, checked every fifteen minutes
- Still to come
- An autopicker for a missed card, and a kickoff nudge
- Running cost
- $0 plus a domain name
The pool, exactly as we play it
Every one of these is enforced by the site, not by the honour system.
- The card
- Ten picks a week, each ranked 1 to 10. A correct pick earns its rank. 55 points is a perfect week.
- What you can pick
- Any side against the spread, or any game total over/under.
- Doubling up
- You can take the spread and the total on the same game as two separate picks. You can’t take both sides of the same bet.
- The board
- Every FBS-vs-FBS college game and every NFL game. No FCS opponents.
- The split
- Week 1 is ten college picks. Once the NFL starts, it’s five college and five pro.
- No pushes
- Every spread and total carries a half-point, so nothing ever ties.
- Submitting
- All ten go in before the card saves. After that, any pick stays editable until its own game kicks off.
- Locking
- Each pick freezes at its own kickoff — pick and rank both.
- Showing up late
- If games are gone, you play a short card off the top ranks. Five picks means 10 through 6 — a 40-point ceiling instead of 55.
- Not showing up
- Slots you never filled score zero.
Why the rolling lock matters
This is the rule that makes the pool interesting, and it’s the one worth seeing in motion. Because each pick freezes at its own kickoff, a rank you spend on a Thursday night game is spent for the week. Put your 10 on Thursday and you’re assigning 9 through 1 across everything left.
10 Illinois −25.5 — kicked off Thursday, final
4 Oklahoma −41.5 — kicked off Friday, final
…
Ranks 10 and 4 are settled. The other eight still move.
How the numbers get in
The part that would otherwise be an hour of typing every week.
The board is big — a full college Saturday plus a full NFL Sunday runs to roughly seventy games, and each one carries a spread and a total. That’s about 140 numbers. Nobody is typing that in by hand in October.
So it’s automated. The lines come off a sportsbook odds board, and a script does the rest:
It reads the board, throws out anything against an FCS opponent, adds the half-point to any line that came in on a whole number, and hands back a clean slate. This week that meant dropping seven games — Albany at Buffalo, Idaho at Utah, Long Island at Kansas and four others — and hooking 24 of the 40 that were left.
Then it’s reviewed before it goes live. Nothing publishes automatically; the board gets eyeballed and locked, and once locked the numbers can’t change — not even by whoever posted them. Everybody plays the same line all week.
Scoring works the same way in reverse. Final scores come from a free public feed covering both leagues, get matched against the board, and settle every card without anyone entering a result. A game is checked every fifteen minutes until it goes final.
What’s running
All but the last two are live, not planned.
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The pick sheet Live
Full board, ranking, the 5-and-5 split, doubling up on a game, rolling kickoff locks, short cards. Your first pick takes the top rank and works down from there.
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The lines pipeline Live
Automatic pull, FCS filtering, half-point hooks — then a review where the commissioner picks which games make the week. Nothing goes live unlooked-at.
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Accounts Live
A username and a password you choose, good for the season. Passwords are kept only as a salted hash, so nobody — me included — can read one back. Forget yours and the commissioner hands you a one-time code.
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Saved cards Live
Cards live in the database, not in your browser. Sign in from a phone at a tailgate and it’s the card you saved on Tuesday, with whatever hasn’t kicked off still editable.
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Scoring and standings Live
Finals arrive on their own and settle each pick. Weekly and season standings, ties sharing a place the way the old pool did, plus the poolwide grid showing who took what — started games only.
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Both pools, kept apart Live
The 55-point spread pool and the straight-up confidence pool run side by side with their own boards, rosters and standings. Being in one tells you nothing about the other, and a couple of us are in both.
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Commissioner tools Live
Post and lock the board, choose the week’s games, settle or void one by hand when a team name comes through spelled oddly, run the roster, issue a password code, and post a note that pops up once when people sign in.
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An autopicker To come
For a card that never got filled in. What it should actually do — chalk straight down the board, or repeat last week’s ranks — is a house rule, not a technical problem, so it’s waiting on us.
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A kickoff nudge To come
A reminder before the first game to anyone without a full card in. It needs an email or text service, which is the only piece here that would cost real money.
What it costs
For a group this size, essentially nothing.
| Item | Per year |
|---|---|
| Hosting and database | Free tier |
| Accounts and sessions | Free tier |
| Lines and scores | $0 |
| Domain name | ~$12 |
| Total | ~$12 |
The free tiers are sized for tens of thousands of users. A pool of fifty doesn’t come close to the ceiling, and there’s no per-member cost as the group grows. If we ever outgrew them it would be a good problem, and it would still be a few dollars a month.
The house rules we settled
Three rulings, and where they landed
None of these were technical questions. They are how the group plays, and the site enforces all three the same way every week.
- A whole number hooks against the chalk. A line coming in at LSU −10 gets posted at −10.5 — the favourite lays the extra half, so LSU has to win by 11. A total landing on 54 gets posted at 54.5, so the over needs one more point. Nothing ever pushes. This decided 24 of week one’s 40 games. The board shows the posted number and nothing else; the original isn’t displayed, because the posted one is the only number anybody plays.
- Picks stay dark until kickoff. The poolwide grid shows a pick only once its own game has started. The filtering happens on the server, so the picks you can’t see yet are not sitting in the page waiting to be found.
- A late entrant plays a short card off the top ranks. Turn up on Sunday morning with college gone and you get whatever is still open, taking the highest ranks — five NFL games play 10 through 6. You lose the points you couldn’t use, not the week.
The rules were the hard part, and they’re done. The board posts itself, the finals land on their own, the standings keep themselves. If something ever scores wrong, say so — a game can be settled by hand in about ten seconds.