How does Pigskin Picks work?
The premise
Every week of the NFL regular season, you pick the winner of each game and compete against everyone in your league. Each league chooses one of two scoring styles when it's created:
- Straight picks — every correct pick counts for 1. Most correct picks wins.
- Picks + confidence points — you also rank your picks by how sure you are, and correct picks earn points based on that ranking.
You can check which style your league uses on its league page (or just look at the leaderboard — a straight-picks league has no points column).
How confidence points work
If one or more of the leagues you're in use confidence points, here's the deal: when a week has 14 games, you get the numbers 1 through 14 to hand out — each number used exactly once, one per game. Your most-confident pick gets 14, your least-confident gets 1.
Worked example: You give the Chiefs your 14. If the Chiefs win, you earn 14 points (and 1 "correct pick"). If they lose, you earn nothing for that game. Meanwhile the game you gave a 3 — one you weren't sure about — only costs you 3 points if it goes wrong.
That's the whole strategy: put big numbers on sure things, small numbers on coin flips.
In a straight-picks league, none of this applies — there are no numbers to assign, and if all of your leagues play straight picks you won't even see the confidence dropdowns.
You don't have to pick every game
Partial picks are allowed. If there are 14 games and you only pick 5, that's fine — unpicked games simply score zero.
And if your league uses confidence points, here's the strategic part: you may still use your highest values on the games you did pick. Picking 5 games and giving them 14, 13, 12, 11, and 10 is perfectly legal.
When picks lock
The entire week locks at the kickoff of that week's first game — usually Thursday night. That means Thursday's kickoff locks your Sunday and Monday picks too. This applies to every league, whichever scoring style it uses.
Why lock everything at once? In a confidence-points league, your confidence is a ranking across the whole week — if later games locked separately, you could make a cautious Thursday pick, watch the result, and then reshuffle your big numbers with information nobody else had. Locking the whole slate keeps it fair (and keeps straight-picks leagues from picking Sunday games with Thursday's result already known).
Before the lock you can change your picks as many times as you like. Whatever is saved at lock time is final — including partial or empty pick sheets. The picks page shows a countdown so you always know how long you have.
Ties
If a game ends in a tie, nobody gets credit — no correct pick and no confidence points, for either side. It happens about once a season.
Postponed and canceled games
- Postponed games are scored once they're actually played, using the picks you already made. Even if the game moves to a different calendar week, it counts under the week it was originally scheduled in.
- Canceled games are voided for everyone. No one earns anything from them, and in a confidence league the value you spent there is simply lost.
Schedule changes
The NFL moves games around during the season ("flex scheduling"), so kickoff times can change. Since the lock follows the earliest game, the lock time can move earlier. If that happens, you'll get an email so your picks don't get stranded.
Multiple leagues
You make one pick sheet per week, and it can be applied to every league you belong to — check or uncheck leagues on the picks page. You never have to enter picks twice. If you're in a mix of scoring styles, the same sheet serves both: your confidence numbers count in confidence leagues and are simply ignored in straight-picks leagues.
How ranking works
- Straight-picks leagues rank by correct picks. Players who are tied share the same rank.
- Confidence leagues rank by correct picks first, with confidence points as the tiebreaker — and you can flip the sort to rank by points instead.
The season page also tracks weeks won — how many weeks you finished on top.