No football knowledge required. If you can guess who wins, you can play — and you can't lose points, ever.
1Tap the team you think will win
Each week we post every game involving a Top 25 team — the 25 teams voted best in the country
that week. For each one, tap the team you think wins. That's the whole game. You are not predicting
scores, and you are not betting any money.
2Every pick is worth a different number of points
The small number on each team's button — like +6 — is what you earn if
that team wins. Games that are easy to call pay almost nothing. Games nobody expects you to call pay a lot.
| If you pick… | You earn | Because |
|---|
| A team expected to win easily | +1 to +3 | Everyone saw that coming — there's little credit in agreeing |
| An even matchup | around +5 | A genuine coin flip, so it's worth real points |
| A team expected to lose | +7 to +10 | Hardly anyone calls these, so calling one pays big |
Right pick, you bank the points. Wrong pick, you get zero. Skipped a game, zero.
Nothing ever subtracts points — so there's no reason not to pick every game on the board.
3Playing it safe won't win the season
Pick nothing but the expected winners and you'll collect a slow trickle of 1s and 2s all year.
The leaderboard gets won by whoever correctly calls a few upsets. That tension is the whole game —
how many favorites do you take, and where do you gamble?
4Everything locks at the first kickoff
Change your picks as often as you like until the week's earliest game starts. At that moment the
whole week locks for everyone at once, and anything you left unpicked scores zero. The
countdown at the top of this page always shows exactly how long you have left, and you can
put the deadline straight on your phone's calendar with one tap. After it locks you can see
everyone else's picks under Week Results — hidden before then so nobody can copy. Points
post automatically within a few hours of each game ending; you don't have to do anything.
The numbers on screen, translated
- #4 in front of a team name
- That team's national ranking this week. #1 is the best team in the country, #25 the last one to make the list. No number means that team isn't ranked — often the underdog.
- Alabama -3.5 under the date
-
The Las Vegas betting line. It's shorthand for "the oddsmakers expect Alabama to win by about 3½ points."
The bigger the number, the more lopsided the game is expected to be — Oregon -21.5 means a blowout is
expected, SMU -1.5 means it's nearly a toss-up. This does not change how you pick — you're only
choosing a winner, not the margin. It's shown so you can see how close a game is supposed to be, and it's
what determines the points.
- +6 on a team's button
- What that pick pays you if that team wins. Higher number = the oddsmakers think that team is less likely to win.