User Guide

The commissioner sends each player a personal registration link. This link is specific to your league, though feel free to share with anyone else you think may be interested in joining — the more the merrier. Click the link, enter the registration information, and a sign-in link will be sent to your inbox. Click that link and you're registered and signed in automatically. No password needed, ever.

Your registration link is a one-time thing. Once you've registered, don't go back to it to get in again. From then on, every sign-in link is requested from the main site: go to nflrecordspool.com, click Get a Sign-In Link, enter your email, and click the link that arrives. You can request one as many times as you need.

Once you're signed in, you'll land on the record prediction page. Your job is to predict the end-of-season win/loss record for all 32 NFL teams. Every team plays 17 games, so the entire league plays a combined 272 wins worth of games — your predictions must add up to exactly 272 wins total.

The page keeps a running total as you go and won't let you submit until the number is right. If you're stuck, try nudging a few teams up or down by half a win (ties count as 0.5 wins, e.g. an 8-8-1 season is entered as 8.5).

At the bottom of the form you'll also find the tiebreaker field — see Section 2.5 below for details on that.

You can come back and edit your predictions as many times as you'd like before the August 26 deadline. After that, they're locked in.

Not ready to submit yet? Click the Save Draft button beside Submit at any point to save your in-progress picks to your account, then close the tab and come back later to finish.

At the bottom of your record prediction form, you'll see a tiebreaker field. Your job is to guess the total number of points scored across all 272 NFL regular season games — home and away combined, for every single game played.

Tiebreaker rule: if two or more players finish with the same total score at the end of the season, the player who guessed closest to the actual total points scored is the winner — higher or lower.

The tiebreaker is only used if there's a tie on total score. For reference, the NFL regular season typically produces somewhere between 10,000 and 14,000 total points, though the number varies each year.

Your tiebreaker guess is submitted alongside your record predictions and is editable up to the August 26 deadline. Once locked, it can't be changed.

Once the August 26 deadline passes, all record predictions are locked and the group's collective averages are revealed. You can now see what the entire league predicted for every team.

Your next task is to make four Over/Under picks. Choose 2 teams you think will outperform the group average and 2 teams you think will underperform it. That's it — just four picks.

For example: if the group projects the Chiefs to win 11 games on average and you think they'll do better, pick them as an Over. If they actually finish 13-4, you score points for every win above the group average. If you picked them to Under instead and they still went 13-4, you lose points.

The Over/Under picks page is available from the homepage once predictions are locked. The deadline for O/U picks is September 9 — right at the NFL season opener kickoff.

Once picks are locked, the scoring runs itself — check the Standings page any time and your score updates as teams play games and their records take shape. You never have to submit anything again to stay in the pool.

But the pool doesn't play itself. The In-Season Hub below is where the season is actually won: a survivor pick every week, up to seven record tweaks, and one O/U swap. Ignoring the hub is a valid strategy; it just isn't a passive one.

Two of the three decay, one doesn't. Record tweaks and the O/U swap are scaled by how many games a team has left, so the same move is worth less the longer you sit on it. A survivor pick is not — Week 1 and Week 17 are worth the same point. What survivor rewards is showing up every week, because you can only make one pick per week and a week you skip is a point you can never go back and get.

Tiebreaker: if two or more players finish with the same total score, the player whose pre-season guess for total regular season points scored is closest to the actual total wins. Higher or lower — pure proximity.

The In-Season Hub gives you three ways to keep your picks competitive as the season unfolds. Find it in the nav bar or at nflrecordspool.com/in-season.

They didn't all open at the same time. The Off-Pace Pick'Em opened before kickoff, so Week 1 counted. O/U Revival and Record Tweaks opened once Week 1 results were final — those two need results to work against; the Pick'Em doesn't, which is why it started first. All three now run for the rest of the season. Each team locks at its own kickoff: once a team's game that week has started, it can't be picked, tweaked, or swapped in or out until the week rolls over after Monday night's kickoff.

There are no passwords. Any time you need to get back into the site, go to the homepage and click Get a Sign-In Link. Enter your email address and a fresh link will be sent to you. Click it and you're in.

Sign-in links expire after a short window, so if yours has gone stale just request a new one from the homepage.