League rules

How it works — the short version

• Each week you pick one team. That team must win for you to survive.
• You cannot use the same team twice all season. A team you spent before a loss is still spent after a rebuy — buying back in returns your entry, never your teams.
• A loss ends your entry unless a rebuy is available to you.
• The last player standing wins the pot.

Ties

A tie is neither a win nor a loss. You stay alive, and the following week you must win 2 games instead of one. Nothing about this costs money — a tie changes how many winning picks you need, and nothing else.

• Tie one game → next week you make 2 picks, in 2 different games, and every one of them must win.
• Winning 2 games clears it, and you are back to one pick a week.
• Winning some but not all does not reduce it. Needing 2 and going win-plus-tie leaves you needing 2 again the week after.
• Tie every game in a 2-pick week and the requirement multiplies again — 2 becomes 4.
• Any loss in a multi-pick week ends your entry, however well the other picks did.
• Every pick in a multi-pick week still follows the no-reuse rule — so a 2-win week spends 2 teams, and you cannot take both sides of the same game.
• A rebuy wipes the requirement. Buy back in and you start again at one pick a week — though the teams you spent stay spent.

A tie in Week 18 is a loss. There is no following week in which to pay the debt, and you do not advance on a tie.

Deadlines

• The typical deadline is Sunday 12:55 PM Eastern. That is when the bulk of the slate kicks off, and it covers the Sunday night and Monday games too.
• Any team playing earlier locks earlier — 5 minutes before that game kicks off. Thursday night, Friday, Saturday, and the international morning games all fall under this.
• Weeks are not identical. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the late-season Saturday slates move games around, and one-off scheduling changes happen. The lock time shown next to each game on Games is the authoritative one — it is recalculated from the real schedule, so check there rather than assuming a week looks like the last one.
• You can change a pick freely until it locks. After that it is fixed, and there is no self-service way to change it — if something has genuinely gone wrong, email the commissioner. Forgetting is not something that gets undone.
• Miss the deadline and you are assigned the strongest available favorite by the league’s locked point spread, from teams still legal for you. It counts exactly as though you had chosen it — including spending that team for the season.
• An automatic pick is only ever made at the Sunday deadline, and only from the games that lock then — the main Sunday slate, Sunday night and Monday. It is never a Thursday, Saturday or early-Sunday team. Not picking before an early game does nothing to you; nothing is assigned until Sunday.

Three examples

• You want a Sunday afternoon team. Pick any time up to Sunday 12:55 PM. Change your mind as often as you like until then.
• You want the Thursday night team. That pick locks 5 minutes before Thursday’s kickoff — two and a half days before everyone else’s. Decide early or pick somebody else.
• You forget entirely. At Sunday 12:55 PM a team is assigned to you and locked in. You are still alive, still in, and that team is now spent.

Point spreads are shown for information and to decide default picks only. They never determine whether you survive — your pick either wins or it does not.

Entry options and rebuys

$20 entry — $20

• Lose in Week 1: rebuy for $10. This price applies to Week 1 only.
• Lose in Weeks 2–5: rebuy for $30. No exceptions.
• A loss in Week 6 or later ends your entry. There is no rebuy after that, at any price.

$80 entry — $80

• Includes 3 free rebuys, usable for losses through Week 8.
• Unused rebuys expire. A clean sheet with all 3 unused plus a loss in Week 9 means you are out.
• Extra rebuys cannot be purchased on this option, at any point.

A rebuy clears any outstanding tie requirement, and puts your entry back in play.

It does not give you a single team back. Every team you have picked this season stays picked, for the rest of the season, however many times you buy back in. Nobody is handed a used team again — not on appeal, not as a one-off, not because it was spent on a week that went badly. Late-season weeks are survivable only if you have left yourself something to pick, and keeping track of that is your job. The Games page marks the teams you have spent.

Every Sunday at 1:00 PM Eastern, once the deadline has passed and every pick is locked, a recap goes out to the whole league: who picked what, how many rebuys each player has left, and the teams everyone has used. Before that email, nobody’s pick is visible to anybody else — picks become public when they lock, and not a minute earlier.

This season is free — how that changes things

This league runs alongside the one Pick runs. His is the one played for money; this one costs nothing, and nothing on this site will ever ask you to pay.

The $50

Will is putting up $50 of his own money. It is split at the end between everyone who kept playing — not winner-takes-all, because the point is to have people using the site all season rather than only the lucky ones. Being knocked out does not take you out of it; keep making picks and you stay in.

One person can only win one share, no matter how many entries they have. You are welcome to register more than one email address if you want to try both buy-in options and see how they differ — that is genuinely useful testing — but the shares are counted per person, not per entry.

This league ends when it ends

It runs until there is nobody left standing. That is not tied to Pick's league: his can finish first, or this one can, and neither forces the other to stop.

You still pick $20 or $80

The option you choose costs you nothing here, but it still decides your rebuys — which is exactly what makes it worth testing both:

• $20 option — free rebuys if you lose, through Week 5.
• $80 option — three free rebuys, through Week 8.

On a season played for real those rebuys cost money. Here the price is zero, so the only thing the option changes is how many second chances you get and how long they last.

If you run out of teams

Late in the season, or after a tie has you owing several wins at once, it is possible to reach a week with no legal team left to pick — every side you could take is one you have already spent.

The app will not invent a pick for you and it will not quietly eliminate you. It records the problem for the commissioner, who will contact you and sort it out. This is rare, it is not a loophole, and it is not something to engineer on purpose — it is simply the one case the automatic rules cannot resolve on their own.

Which is the practical reason to look at the teams you have left before Week 15 rather than during it.

Winning and splitting

• The last player standing takes the pot — unless the players still alive decide to end it early and divide the money between themselves, which they may do after any week from Week 6 onward.
• It must be 100% unanimous. Every surviving player has to say yes. The moment one person votes no the proposal is withdrawn from everybody, and the league plays on into the next week.
• Not responding counts as no. Silence is a vote against, not an abstention. The vote closes when the next week’s first game kicks off.
• A split does not have to be equal. Any division the survivors all agree to is valid — three players might agree to 50/30/20 because one of them is plainly in front. There is an example on the FAQ.
• Money splits as evenly as whole cents allow, so somebody may end up a cent or two short of somebody else. Sort that out however you like — hand the odd cents to one person, flip for it, roll for it, nobody minds. What is not negotiable is who it goes to: surviving players only, no exceptions. Not eliminated players, not the commissioner, not anyone who is not still in it.
• If more than one player is still alive after Week 18, the pot splits evenly among them.

Terms of participation

Version 2026.2