Hi Everyone! Welcome to the 2024 season! What a great opening game last night if you were able to see it all the way until the end. We have a record 76 players in the pool this year! We have 9 new players so let's welcome Aaron L, Alec S, Beth C, Jason M, Joshua L, Tim S, TJ C, Tom B and Tom C! Here's an interesting table of how many years each of the players in this league have played for, now in its 14th season (10th online through Pick'em Plus). Years Played 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Total # Players 9 10 5 4 1 2 4 1 6 4 7 3 6 14 76 Special thanks to the 14 players who have stuck with us through all of these years! To learn more about who's in the pool this year, go to the red Info button on your home page and you can see everyone's updates & predictions for the season. You'll also see your payment status and I've updated it through all funds received at the time of this email. Thanks to about 2/3 of the pool for sending in your payment. If you haven't paid yet, please do so.
Now for some changes to the process for this year's pool. Congrats to everyone for getting their picks in for Week 1 but I understand that sometimes life gets busy and we forget about the pool and missing a week pretty much puts you out of contention for the season-long prizes. So here's a reminder to set a weekly reminder for Thursdays to get your picks in. The website is non-forgiving--you miss the deadline for the first kickoff of the week and you're locked out, there's nothing you or an admin can do to see or modify your picks. However, if that fails, we are introducing a backup procedure that will allow players to still get their picks in so they still have a shot at the current weekly prizes and it doesn't destroy their season chances. Here are the rules:
• Thursday’s pick (and any that have already passed), Survivor pick and Monday night tie breaker points are forfeited • Picks for the remaining games that week will be emailed to the Pool Administrator (me at howard.c.lu@gmail.com) for manual entry • A $5 administration fee will be paid electronically for the labor intensive decoding and encoding of pick data to insert into the database. The fee is an admin fee and will not increase any pool payouts. • Deadline for emailed picks and $5 electronic admin fee is due by that Saturday 11:59pm ET. If both are not received by then, the week’s picks are forfeited. • Players who picked but missed one or more picks are also eligible to submit the $5 fee and email their missed pick(s) in but any existing picks cannot be changed. Thursday and Survivor picks are not eligible as “missed picks”. • Late submissions are allowed for the entire regular season except for Week 18, the last week of the season where a player can potentially gain an unfair advantage knowing the picks of the season leaders despite forfeiting the first game. • For transparency, all manually added late submission picks will be announced to the entire pool prior to the start of Sunday’s games.
We also switched the source of the spreads from OddsShark to ESPN as they have a more consistent feed that is less likely to change in the future.
Attached are all of the rules for the year as reference. Good luck picking this year and have fun! -H P.S. If you haven't signed up for the season yet and would still like to join, I will waive the admin fee for this week to get in if you still want to. Going forward for the season, I will only email players who are in so as not to spam everyone.