NFL pool - opinions & suggestions wanted

In My Humble Opinion
1

It’s my turn to run the football pool this year, wherein we celebrate the mighty Buccaneers and their annual campaign through mediocrity and towards excellence.

It’s usually pretty straightforward; you pick what you think the regular season record will be, and at the end if you are right you win everybody’s, uh, matchbooks. It costs five matchbooks to play.

In years past there have been records which everyone wanted, 11-5 for example, and if someone else got that pick, you were out of luck. We usually draw numbers out of a hat - that was your pick order. (Only about 10-15 people are in this pool.)

This year I have the idea that if you want 11-5 like the other guy, you also put down your five matchbooks on 11-5 and if they finish 11-5, you split the winnings with the other guy. More popular choices pay out less matchbooks this way. Also this way, the notion of pick order is not important. (In the past, pick order has caused some small acrimonies.)

And then, after you make your first pick, in a second round of picks you would then be allowed to pick a record that maybe nobody else picked. So after everyone’s made their pick and you see that nobody picked 3-13, you may decide that what the hell, put 5 matchbooks on it and win it all, maybe. So if someone wanted to lay down 25 matchbooks and pick 3-13, 5-11, 7-9, 9-7, and 11-5, that would be OK. Does this make sense? I hope so. (The pot is way bigger this year and you are not tied to just one outcome, i.e. if you pick 12-4 and they lose the first five games, you’ve lost interest in the pool before November.)

What I am having trouble with is, it would be nice to have any playoff games factor into the pool as well, for once, but I haven’t decided that just making record picks like 11-6 and 12-6 available would be OK, or if I should have playoff games and the Super Bowl be sort of like a separate category.

I have until next Friday to deliver, any input is welcome.

2

I’ll be happy to put a little thought into this, but I’d just like to clarify – we’re only talking about what the Bucs do, correct? We’re not worried about the other 31 team’s records?

3

That’s correct, this is a home - team pool.

4

Ok, the problem here is there are only 17 possible outcomes – the Bucs can win between zero and 16 games. These numbers are more or less on a bell curve – winning zero or 16 are both extremely unlikely, with the highest odds being somewhere in the 7-9 win range (quick side note: we’re not going to get into the possibility of ties here – they’re very unlikely, and they really muddle things up…we’ll deal with them later).

With such a small number of possible outcomes, there isn’t a lot of room to make things more interesting. So, here is my proposal – to begin with, the regular season is divided into four quarters: Weeks 1-5, Weeks 6-9, Weeks 10-13 and Weeks 14-17 (the first quarter goes through Week 5 because the Bucs have a Week 4 bye).

1: Each player puts in their five matchbooks and selects a final record between 0-16 and 16-0.
2: Each player then picks a record for each quarter between 0-4 and 4-0. This is done for all four quarters of the season.
3: At the end of the season, if only one player correctly predicts the season record, they win all the matchbooks. If there is a tie, then the tie is broken by looking at the 4th quarter prediction. If all or none of the players are correct, then the tie is broken by looking at the 3rd quarter, and so on down through the 2nd and 1st quarters (the theory here being that it’ll be harder to pick the late-season games). If, after looking at the full season record and the four quarter records there is still a tie, then the pot should be split between those remaining.
4: A player may enter up to five times (at five matchbooks per).

One more thing to consider – if the Bucs wind up with a tie game on their record, it would muck things up terribly. You should determine before the season if a tie game should count as a win or a loss for purposes of your pool.

If you decide to go with this, keep me in the loop – I’d be curious as to how it shakes out.
Hey, if this works out, maybe I’ll have my second copywritten football pool. :slight_smile:

5

That works quite well but I can see myself patiently explaining it two times, then not so patiently another two or three times. Some of these people in the pool are not what I would call especially involved in football the way “normal people like you and I are” and asking them to break down the season that way may be a bit much for them. Perhaps I am biased. I will consider this further, and thank you for it.

“What about a tie?” An excellent question I had not considered. Hmmmmm. At this time I would prefer to consider a tie as a loss. More hmmmm.

Yesterday I spent a few minutes laying out possible full-season records including playoffs; 11-6, 12-6, 16-1 etc. Then I got hung up on first round bye weeks, and caught an immediate numbers headache.

Ah well, I have a few days yet, the Bucs by the way finished 1-3 in preseason - rather shabby.

6

Ok, here’s a simple to explain, yet effective idea: how about treating it like a confidence pool? Instead of picking the 16 games that are played in a week, you can have everyone pick the 16 games that make up the Bucs season.

They then assign a point value to each of their picks, using each of the numbers from 1 through 16. At the end of the season, the points placed on correct picks are totaled up, and the high scorer gets all the matchbooks.

As a visual aid, I put together a template version (both blank and filled out). Do with it what you will, and good luck!