Sorry for the slight delay, but here is the initial post for this year’s pool.
This is the 3rd year of the pool. It was won by @Hometown_Fan in year 1 and @usc4dav last year. The prize is the coveted Amazing Kreskin Award shown below.
Last year’s final standings are linked below:
I won’t retype all the details of the rules as I did so last year and that is linked below so give them a quick look. The rules are essentially the same as the CFL Pool rules. Make your picks in time each week. Scoring is the same in that it goes wins, perfect weeks and then aggregate. Perfect weeks are gold. No one has ever had more than 2 in a year.
That is largely because there are 6 games a week to pick from. We started with 4 but with feedback and based on trial and error settled on 6. Picking all games are too onerous for many and the goal is to keep it simple. There are also too many non competetive games per week. This plagued the CFL pool for many years until this year when the league became very competetive from top to bottom for the most part. At least in this pool we have some control over the match ups. The number of perfect weeks will tell you how difficult the pool is and they are down by about half in the CFL Pool this year, but should still exceed the number of perfect weeks in this pool.
I will be posting the Week 1 games in a separate post right after this one and for odd weeks @mahalcflers is back and will be choosing the games in even weeks. The goal is to pick expected competetive games as much as possible, with the odd low hanging fruit thrown in. Every team will be picked at least once during the season although expected duds like Carolina might only be picked once. The picks aren’t based on popularity or necessarily on being a good team, which may have lots of one sided games on the schedule. As always there will likely be a couple of tough picks per week between less than stellar teams. We do try to include all marquee games such as Dallas/SF, Buffalo/Miami, KC/Baltimore for example, as long as they are expected to be competetive.
As you probably know, the NFL schedule contains Thursday games, Monday games and Saturday games late in the season, in addition to the customary Sunday games. We tend to shy away from Thursday games as they come early in the week, but really that is no different than the CFL up to Labour Day. Be warned that both a Thursday and one off Friday game is on next week’s slate because they are among the best games. Historically however we usually pass on most Thursday games, excluding Thanksgiving. Some Monday games are chosen but historically a lot of those games are pretty crappy, so not too often. We will try and post each week’s slate on Sunday, even if the previous week isn’t completed. My recommendation is that you make your picks on the Tuesday or Wednesday of each week to not possibly miss picking a Thursday game, but if there is no Thursday game you will have until Saturday of each week or even Sunday morning.
https://forums.cfl.ca/t/2023-nfl-regular-season-pool-rules-and-week-1-picks/87988?u=jon
Aside from the assistance of my pool co founder @mahalcflers, as @GridironGirl has retired from her stats work, @BomberJunkie has put some significant time into developing an automated stats system for this pool similar to the one he put together for the CFL Pool. He just completed it but it needs to be tested over the next week or two. I understand that this pool is a little more difficult to automate but that type of technical knowledge is well above my pay grade. I am sure it will be perfected shortly. I can’t thank @BomberJunkie enough for his hard work and invaluable assistance. Calculating stats manually is difficult and time consuming and increases the chance of human error as I am sure @Abendschan can attest to.
As always every member of the forum is invited to participate. Tomorrow I will ping some members that have already not been pinged or posted their first picks.
Good luck to all!
it ain’t -4 degrees out side week one.
their defence at home was elite last year. I don’t think CeeDee sitting in all offseason helps out Dallas at all.
this should be San Fran, but I will take the Jets shocking the world (also could see some regression in San Fran)
