30th Annual Football Pool — Rules

1. Fees

• Each participant pays $40 to enter the pool.
• If you still owe money from last year, that balance plus this year's fee is due before the season starts, or you won't be permitted to enter.
• Every participant must be paid in full by Week 4, or risks removal from the pool.

Site note: the site tracks who owes what on each member's Account page — it doesn't collect payment itself. Money still moves by cash or e-transfer, same as before.

2. Making your picks

• Pick every game against the spread. Spreads are posted each Tuesday and locked for the week.
• You may designate one game as your Lock of the week — optional, and only one per week.
• If you're in the survivor pool, you also pick one team to win outright.

Site note: the original rules used two weekly forms (a Thursday/Saturday form and a Sunday/Monday form), each with its own deadline — missing one defaulted every game on that form. The site locks each game individually at its own kickoff instead. Miss Sunday's early games and Monday night is still yours to pick. This also removes the old survivor-pool step of picking a Thursday team on one form and re-confirming it on the other — there's just one form now, so there's nothing to re-confirm.

Site note: spreads are pulled from ESPN's odds data (DraftKings), taking the median across additional books when more than one is available, rather than a single named source. If books disagree sharply on a line, the commissioner is flagged to review it before it's posted.

Site note: the commissioner makes their own picks and submits them before spreads are posted, same as always — the site now emails that submission automatically to five randomly chosen participants as a timestamped record, replacing the manual email.

3. Scoring

• Each correct pick is worth 1 point.
• A correct pick on Monday night is worth 2 points. If there are two Monday games, only the second (later) one is worth 2 — the first is worth 1.
• A perfect week — every game correct, playoffs excepted — earns a 5-point bonus. A push anywhere in the week breaks a perfect week; it doesn't count as a loss, but it isn't a perfect week either.
• Every correct pick in the playoffs is worth 3 points, with no Monday-night doubling and no Lock.
• Your optional Lock pays one extra point on a win — 2 points normally, 3 on a Monday nighter — and costs a flat 1 point on a loss, Monday or not. You may only lock one game a week.

4. Weekly prize

• Each week, $40 goes to whoever had the highest score (it was $60 in Weeks 1-3; a members' poll lowered it for Weeks 4-18, and the $20 a week saved, $300 in all, is added to the first-place prize).
• Engagement prize: in Weeks 11-18, anyone with no more than one wrong pick in a week wins $250, split if several members do it that week. It pays out once, the first week it is hit.
• Ties break, in order: most correct picks that week, then highest score the following week, then most correct picks the following week — continuing forward through subsequent weeks until the tie breaks.
• Default picks count toward the weekly prize like any other pick, as long as you made at least one pick yourself that week. If every one of your picks that week was a default, you're not eligible for that week's prize.

Site note: because ties now break on the following week (as originally written), a tied week genuinely has no winner yet — the site marks it pending and settles it, prize included, once a later week breaks the tie.

5. Annual prizes

Ties in the final standings are broken by each participant's guess at the Super Bowl's total combined score — closest guess wins the tiebreak, taking the higher position.

Exception: for a tie in last place, it's inverted — the closest guess is placed lower, so the Waltman Award goes to whoever wins that tiebreak.

6. Default picks

At signup, every participant chooses a default: all favorites, all underdogs, all home teams, or all away teams. Any game you haven't picked by its kickoff automatically falls back to this rule.

Site note: your default can be changed any time from Account, and only takes effect on games that haven't kicked off yet — it can't retroactively change an already-graded pick.

7. Family Feud

• A $40 side-bet, open to families with at least 2 members in the pool.
• A family's score is the average of its members' scores, so a bigger family is no advantage.
• The family with the highest average score at the end of the playoffs wins the side-pot.
• A tie is broken the same way as the season standings, using each family's averaged Super Bowl guess.
• The $40 fee is charged to one family member, chosen at random.

Site note: opt in with the Family Feud checkbox at signup. The commissioner groups opted-in members into named families afterward once everyone's signed up.

8. Survivor pool

• A separate $40 entry. You must also be in the regular spread pool to play survivor.
• Each week, pick one team to win its game outright — not against the spread.
• Lose or tie, and you're eliminated. Win, and you survive to the next week.
• You may never pick the same team twice in a season.
• If every remaining player loses or ties in the same week, nobody is eliminated and the pool continues — but anyone who simply didn't submit a pick that week is still eliminated.
• Whoever survives the most consecutive weeks without elimination wins the pot; if more than one player is still alive at the end of the regular season, they split it.

Site note: your survivor pick locks at that team's own kickoff, not at the first game of the week — pick a team playing later in the week any time before its game starts.

9. Picks are private

Nobody — including the commissioner outside of a dispute — can see what you picked on any game. Once a game finishes, the Scoreboard shows each player's running point total for the week, so you can follow along and see if you're winning, but never any individual pick.

10. Conflict resolution

Whenever these rules don't clearly cover a situation that comes up, affected participants get a chance to explain how they think it should be resolved. The commissioner then convenes a three-person tribunal to decide — preferring participants unaffected by the outcome and those who've been in the pool longest, and never using the same person on more than one tribunal in a season. The tribunal's decision is final.