Football Pick’em Pool Picks 2026

• In a football pick'em pool you pick a series games each week, typically determined by your pool administrator
• The games you pick could be NFL games, college football games, or both
• The most popular format involves picking the winner of every NFL game
• You also may need to specify a number of confidence points for each of your picks, or some picks may be worth more than others
• The pool may offer prizes for the players with the highest total score at the end of the season, or for the top scoring players each week, or both
• If you just need to pick one team each week that has to win its game, you're looking for our NFL Survivor Picks product

• Increased Long Term Pool Profits. In most cases, our picks should help you win prizes in football pick'em pools 2x-10x as frequently as your average opponent. The more pools you play in and the higher the stakes, the more that edge is worth.
• Better Chance For Bragging Rights. Even if you don't win a prize, having a better shot to beat lots of your opponents, or even just one specific opponent (e.g. that boss or spouse of yours who thinks they know football), is worth a lot to some people.
• Time Savings. A lot of people want to participate in the camaraderie and profit opportunities of pick'em pools, but simply don't have hours to devote to weekly pick research. Our product can pay for itself in a week based on time saved alone.
• Decreased Nail Biting And Hair Pulling. Being human, you may find it hard to pick against teams you personally like, and you second guess half your decisions a minute after you make them. We strip out all the agony and bias from your pick making.

Thanks to this range of benefits, our customer base is quite diverse, and includes:

• Hard core pick'em players looking for any incremental edge they can get
• Busy people who want to play at a high level, but value their free time
• Football experts looking to apply a more data-driven approach to pick making
• Football neophytes looking to instantly become perennial prize contenders

• We've developed proprietary computer models that simulate one-week and season long football pick'em contests
• These simulations not only forecast game results, but also use historical pick popularity data to project how all players in a given pool will make their picks
• Running millions of pool simulations gives us a deep understanding of the best picking strategies in many different scenarios
• Our system leverages that research to identify your best possible picks, based on data you enter about your specific pool
• Our algorithmic game predictions, which incorporate betting odds and objective stats, provide the foundation for our picks
• Picks are then customized for your pool's size, scoring system, payout structure, and (for season-long pools) your place in the standings and weeks left
• Our algorithmically customized pool picks are unique in the industry, and provide a substantial edge over generic "expert picks" from other sources

We would be crazy to guarantee that or set that expectation.

Playing in football pick'em pools is less risky than playing the lottery, but it's still a huge gamble. In most pools, participants vie to win a prize that is many times what they paid to enter, all within a timeframe of days or weeks.

If sports pools were easy to win, we'd all be billionaires.

Even using our picks, you won't be expected to win any given pool. The math here is pretty simple. If you're an average competitor in a 25-person pool, for example, then you should expect to win that pool once every 25 years.

Using our picks, you might expect to win that pool once every five years or so. That's pretty amazing -- being about five times as good at winning pools than your average opponent.

Yet even having that huge an edge, you're still going to go years at a time not winning anything (and assuming you stick with it, paying for our picks every year along the way).

With patience and understanding, you would cash in on an amazing 400% profit on your pool entry fees in the long run if you won that pool every five years. That level of expected ROI blows away alternatives like investing in stocks or real estate.

But if you want to achieve it, you've got to have realistic expectations and an over-many-years perspective. Our pool picks are not going to do incredibly well every year -- but our growing, repeat customer base is just one indicator of their overall effectiveness.

• Launched in 2000 from Stanford dorm room
• Passionate team of sports-loving engineers, coders, and data scientists
• Featured in ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Wall St. Journal, New York Times
• 15+ years experience building prediction models for NFL and college football
• 10+ years experience developing data-driven strategies for office pools
• Started research and blogging about football pick'em picks in 2010
• Won inaugural MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference NFL pick'em in 2011
• Launched first version of Football Pick'em Picks product in 2013
• Over 3.5 million site visitors per year and thousands of paying subscribers