NFL Pick'em Streak — Rules

The buy-in

Every player starts the season down $250. That's the whole cost of playing unless you bust and choose to keep going (see Restarting after a bust below).

Picking

• Each week is split into periods, in this order: Wednesday → Thursday → Friday → Saturday → Sunday (day games) → Sunday night → Monday.
• For any period, you can pick the straight-up winner of any number of its games — all of them, some of them, or none at all.
• Spreads shown next to a matchup (e.g. "SEA -3.5") are informational only. Picks are winner-take-all — the spread never affects grading.

Locking & reveal

• A period locks 15 minutes before the earliest kickoff among that period's games — not before each game's own kickoff.
• This matters most for Sunday day games: if the early slate kicks off at 10:00am, the whole Sunday-day period locks at 9:45am — including the late-afternoon games that don't start until hours later.
• Once locked, your picks for that period can't be changed.
• Other players' picks for a period are hidden until that period locks, then visible to everyone.

Grading & streaks

• Once every game in a period is final, that period is graded.
• Every game you picked correctly adds 1 to your streak.
• If any game you picked in that period was wrong, your streak resets to 0.
• A tie counts as a miss for anyone who picked either team — same as a wrong pick.
• A postponed or cancelled game is void: it's skipped entirely, for and against, for anyone who picked it.
• Sitting out a period entirely (no picks) has no effect on your streak either way.

Restarting after a bust

• Busting (streak reset to 0) by itself costs nothing extra.
• Choosing to pick again in a later period — even later the same week — costs an additional $50, charged the moment you submit that pick.
• Your streak then starts building again from 0 based on that pick's result.
• There's no limit to how many times you can bust and restart across the season, other than the deadline below.

Elimination window

After busting in week N, you may skip week N+1 entirely if you want. But you must submit at least one real pick by the end of week N+2 — if you don't pick anything in either of those two weeks, you're permanently eliminated for the season. An eliminated player is frozen at whatever they owed at that point; no further picks are accepted.

Winning

• First player to reach a streak of 15 in a row wins the contest outright.
• If nobody reaches 15 by the end of the season, whoever ever recorded the single longest streak (the "Longest streak" column) wins.