How Do You Handle Postponed Or Canceled Games?

When a game is canceled or postponed to a later week, two simple rules govern what happens to your pick recommendations.

When a game is canceled or postponed to a later week in the days leading up to the originally scheduled kickoff, that can throw a wrench in survivor pools.

How does our tool handle it?

Games Postponed Within The Same Week

If a game is moved to another time later in the same week, that shouldn’t affect your picks or the tools. The custom pick rankings and portfolio pick recommendations will treat the game as if it had always been schedule at the new kickoff time.

Most likely, the new kickoff time would be on Sunday or Monday, so that game would lock along with all the other games at your pool’s designated lock time. If something off the wall happens, like a Thursday game being moved to Saturday, the game would lock at kickoff, just like other early-week games.

Games Postponed To A Later Week Or Canceled

If a game is moved later in the season, or canceled entirely, things get a bit more complicated.

We spent quite a bit of time deciding the best way for our custom pick recommendations to handle these cases. We don’t think there’s a single solution that is going to be perfect for everyone, but here’s what we came up with. It can be summarized in two basic rules:

If you update your picks and your pool hasn’t locked yet, we will remove any postponed games and replace them with new picks.
If it’s past your pool’s lock deadline, we will leave the postponed game in your pick recommendations.

Here are a few examples of how this plays out in different scenarios.

Scenario #1: A Game Is Postponed Before You Ever Get Your Picks

This probably came into play for some people in Week 4 of 2020. The Titans-Steelers game was officially moved off Week 4 on Thursday morning. Anyone who came to get their picks after that time would simply see Tennessee and Pittsburgh listed in their custom pick rankings as having a Bye this week.

Just like other teams on their Bye week, these teams would never be recommended as specific picks in your portfolio.

Scenario #2: A Game Is Postponed After You Get Picks But Before Your Pool Locks

Let’s say you come to the site Wednesday, update your pool status, and get portfolio pick recommendations. Then on Thursday a game is postponed. You come back Thursday afternoon and update your picks.

If this happens, and your pool hasn’t locked yet (remember, you specify the lock time in your weekly status update), we’ll update your pick recommendations based on the latest data. If a team from the postponed game was originally included in your picks, it will be removed and replaced with a team that’s actually going to play.

If the postponed game wasn’t in your picks to begin with, you won’t notice any difference. The teams involved in the postponed game will be ignored just like a team on a Bye week would be.

Scenario #3: A Game Is Postponed After Your Picks Lock

The first two scenarios above are pretty straightforward. You come to get picks, and we don’t suggest picking a team that’s not going to play. Easy, done.

This scenario is a bit more complicated.

If we recommend a team to you as a pick in your portfolio, then the game gets postponed, then your pool locks, and then after your pool lock deadline passes you come back and update your portfolio … we’ll leave the pick in there, because it’s locked.

An example might help.

Let’s say you’re in two pools: one with a Thursday deadline to submit all your picks, and one with a more standard Sunday deadline. Now imagine you get your picks on Thursday and submit them to the early deadline pool. Then on Friday, one of the teams we recommended in your portfolio has their game postponed to a future week. Let’s say we recommended you use them once in each pool. What happens?

Since your first pool’s pick locking deadline has passed, we will leave that postponed game pick in your portfolio. We’re assuming that it’s too late for you to change your picks at that point, and that some weird COVID rule will come into play.

On the other hand, in the pool that hasn’t locked yet, we will remove the postponed game pick from your portfolio, and replace it with a team that will play later in the week.

This way, we can still give you the best recommendations possible for picks that you can still change, and we won’t be changing locked picks after the fact.

Summary

We know this can be a bit confusing, so one more time, just to be clear:

Picks for unlocked pools are free to update, and the postponed game picks will be removed.
Picks for locked pools will not change, regardless of whether the game was postponed.