1. What Is This Product?
Football Pick'em is a multi-week, private, invite-only, free-to-play contest. Each week, players pick winners — and optionally point totals (over/unders) — for the games on that week's slate. It's one flexible product that a commissioner configures to fit their group.
Think of it like this: the "engine" is the same for every league, but the commissioner sets the dials — which sport, how scoring works, and whether spreads are involved — to match how their group likes to play.
The Three Building Blocks Every Commissioner Chooses
Every Pick'em contest is built from three core choices. Together, they determine how the picksheet looks and how winners are decided.
Choice | Options | What It Means for the Group |
League / Sport Mode | NFL only, College (CFB) only, or NFL + College Combined | One contest can run pure NFL, pure college, or blend both sports onto a single weekly picksheet. |
Format (scoring style) | Standard, or Confidence (Best Pick is a bonus feature layered on top of Standard — see 1.2) | Standard is straightforward win/loss scoring. Confidence has entrants rank their picks for variable points. |
Point Spread Mode | Straight Up, Against the Spread (Splash-set), or Against the Spread (Commissioner-set) | Straight Up only cares who wins. Against the Spread requires covering a point spread — either Splash's live odds or numbers the commissioner sets by hand. |
On top of those three choices, commissioners can layer in Segments (mini-leaderboards for a range of weeks), Groups (team-vs-team standings), tiebreakers, weighted scoring, drop-worst-week, and more — all covered in Section 4.
A Note on "Formats" — Standard, Confidence, and Best Pick
The top-level Format setting only has two real values: Standard and Confidence.
"Best Pick" isn't a separate Format option — it's a bonus feature (Best Picks per week) that a commissioner can switch on inside a Standard-format contest.
Confidence and Best Pick can never be combined.
If you're building a contest and don't see "Best Pick" as its own format choice, that's expected — you'll find it as a toggle once you're in a Standard-format setup.