An in-depth, friendly guide. Jump to a section, or just read top to bottom.
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There are three separate rounds each season, and each one is its own bet — nothing carries over between them. Round 1 opens before the season starts, round 2 opens after week 7, and round 3 opens once the actual playoff field is set.
In rounds 1 and 2, you pick any number of teams from all of FBS. Your goal is to cover the 4 teams that actually reach the semifinal games — making the playoff field isn’t enough on its own, they have to go all the way to the semis. In round 3, the goal narrows to the 2 teams that reach the national title game, and your picks are limited to the teams already in the real playoff field.
Scoring rewards precision: whoever covers the full target with the fewest teams wins. If nobody covers the whole target, whoever covers the most of it wins, and ties there go to whoever picked fewer teams. If two or more people are tied on both counts, it’s a split win — everyone tied shares it. And if literally nobody’s set includes even one team from the target, the smallest picked set still wins outright — the board will label this “no one hit a semifinalist — smallest set takes it” so it doesn’t feel like a bug.
You have to pick at least one team — you can’t lock in an empty set. Locking registers your set, but it isn’t final: you can unlock and keep changing your mind as many times as you want, right up until the deadline. The deadline is the only real point of no return — once it passes, everything locks for good.
The picker has a search box, conference filter chips, and a “Top 25” chip that narrows the list to ranked teams sorted by rank. Tap a team to add or remove it — it saves instantly, there’s no separate save step.
As you pick, the header shows your full coverage odds — the chance your set covers 1+, 2+, 3+, and all of the target slots, computed jointly from the market odds — plus a line showing exactly what your latest addition bought you. “Expected covered” is the simpler companion number: add up each picked team’s individual odds of reaching the target (three teams at 70%, 50%, and 20% read 1.4). The distribution is the one to draft by — it prices the tradeoff the game actually scores: coverage against the fewest-teams tiebreak.
After each addition, the header notes what that pick bought — “Adding X as team #5 bought +4.1% to cover 2+” — so you can see the moment new teams stop earning their spot on the tiebreak. Your selected tray is ordered by contribution, with your least valuable pick flagged.
Locking asks you to confirm first, and it isn’t a one-way door: a locked entry shows an Unlock control that drops you right back into the picker, confirm dialog and all. Lock, unlock, and re-lock as many times as you want — the deadline is what actually seals it. If you’d rather skip a round entirely, you can opt out instead — and you can change your mind about opting out for as long as the round stays open.
Each team row can show up to four different kinds of numbers. Here’s what each one means:
| Number | What it means |
|---|---|
| FPI + rank | ESPN’s power rating for the team — higher is better — plus where it ranks among all of FBS. This is a rating, not a probability. |
| CFP % | ESPN’s model estimate of the team’s chance to reach the playoff field at all — not the semis specifically. |
| estimate (“X%* est.”) | ESPN doesn’t publish a direct “chance to reach the semis” number, so when there’s no live market number to use instead, the app approximates it by combining ESPN’s playoff odds and title-game odds. Anywhere you see a trailing “*” after a number and “est.”, that number was calculated by the app, not published by ESPN. |
| Market odds | DraftKings betting lines, pulled in via ESPN, with the sportsbook’s built-in edge mathematically stripped out so the percentage reflects the market’s true implied odds rather than what you’d actually be paid. When a live market number exists, the app shows it instead of the estimate. |
One more thing: a number that’s missing just means it hasn’t synced yet, never that the team is eliminated. The app only ever shows a real 0% when the data genuinely says zero — it never fakes a dash or a zero to fill a gap.
Locking registers your set — it isn’t irrevocable, you can unlock and change it as many times as you like. What is sealed is the secrecy: nobody — including the commissioner, who’s just another player — can see your picks, or even how many teams you picked, until the deadline passes. This isn’t just a UI courtesy: it’s enforced at the database level, so there’s genuinely no path in the app for anyone to peek early.
At the deadline, everything locks for good and everyone’s picks reveal automatically — nobody has to click a button to trigger it. That’s the one moment in the whole round that can’t be undone.
If you’re not locked when the deadline hits, you sit that round out. Your draft never gets revealed to anyone, ever.
Before reveal, the only thing you can see about other players is whether they’ve locked yet — a simple locked / not-locked badge. Never their picks, never their count.
Once a round reveals, the board sorts everyone fewest-teams-first — that’s the leaderboard order until the round settles. Each entry shows its expected coverage, the same sum-of-odds idea from drafting.
A team whose market odds have collapsed near zero shows up with a struck-through, faded “torched” treatment — an at-a-glance signal that the team is basically eliminated.
Tap two players’ cards to compare them head-to-head: which teams only one of them picked, and which teams they both picked.
If the commissioner has set an entry fee, the board also shows the total pot and who’s paid, with a small badge marking anyone who hasn’t paid yet. And there’s a share card — a shareable image or link of the board — for bragging rights outside the app.
Every team has its own page with its record, rank, FPI, the full odds breakdown from above, who currently holds it in the league (once revealed), and its complete season schedule.
The schedule grid lays out every team anyone in the league has picked as a grid of weeks by teams, so you can see everyone’s remaining schedule at a glance.
The “This Week” page is a sweat sheet: just this week’s games for teams the league holds, so you know exactly what to watch and who to root for or against.
You add an email address at signup — it’s required, only used for the weekly pool report and to remind you before a deadline, and never shared with anyone else in the league.
The activity page is the league’s receipts: a public audit trail of signups, lock-ins, round transitions, and any admin actions like unlocks (always with a stated reason) or deadline extensions. It’s full transparency into what happened administratively — and it never shows anyone’s actual picks.
Once the real semifinalists or finalists are known, the commissioner enters the actual results and settles the round. Standings freeze, and places are assigned the competition-style way: if two people tie for 1st, the next place down is 3rd, not 2nd.
The winner banner reflects whichever rule from the top of this page applied — the split- win wording when multiple people tie for first, or the smallest-set wording for the rare case where nobody covered any part of the target.
Payouts: the season’s total buy-ins split across the three rounds — the preseason round’s winner takes 50%, the midseason round’s winner takes 30%, and the pre-playoff round’s winner takes 20%. Remember the pre-playoff round is the smaller target: you’re covering just the two national title game teams, not all four semifinalists like the first two rounds. Ties split that round’s share.