NFL office pools are a great way to get pro football fans closer to the action. Not everyone has the time necessary to play fantasy football and NFL pools are fun, easy to play and take little time from those who partake.
Here’s a look at four of the most popular forms of NFL office pools and how they work.
Survivor Pools
NFL survivor pools are the most popular types of office pool and for good reason. Also known as Eliminator, Loser and Suicide the point of this pool is to stay alive the longest by picking one winning team each week of the NFL season. First pick made that isn’t a winner – including those pesky ties – get you bounced from the field.
The last person standing wins the pot and the all-important bragging rights.
Picking one winner a week sounds easy enough, but there is one caveat: you can only use the same team once. If you pick the Super Bowl favorite in the first week of the season, you can’t pick them again for the rest of the season.
Quick tip for winning your pool: Figure out which teams are the worst in the league and pick against them throughout the season. You can’t pick the same team twice, but you can fade the worst teams multiple times.
Pick’em Pools
NFL pick’em pools are commonly played among friends, family members and coworkers. A pick’em pool rewards the person who picks the most winners in an NFL season.
There are different setups: Some leagues require you to pick winners based off the pointspreads in each game, while others are just interested in the outright winners of games.
There are also some leagues that ask participants to pick every game each week and others that just require a user’s five best picks each week. It’s all about the preference of your group.
One of the best parts of this league is, unlike a survivor pool, players are not eliminated every week. There’s a standings page where users can see how far ahead or behind they are in the pool and there can be a lot of changes at the top of the leaderboard week to week.
NFL Wins Pool
This is a pool that lets its players pick NFL teams for the season. The person with the most combined wins at the end of the regular season - wins the pool.
There are two popular ways of determining who gets which teams. The most common is to do a traditional snake draft, like in fantasy football, where the person with the first pick in the first round gets the last pick in the second round and the person who gets the last pick in first round gets the first pick in the second round.
This method limits the amount of people you can include in your pool. Eight (four teams per person) or four people (eight teams per person) are the best numbers to work with under this setup.
The way to get around this is to split the 32 NFL teams into eight pools with four teams in each group. The first group would include the four teams projected to win the most games for that season. The second group would include the next four best teams, and so on until you get to the eighth group with the four worst projected teams.
Contestants would then have to pick one team from each group to make up their pool of eight NFL teams.
Once the teams have been assigned, the work is done. All you have to do is root for your eight teams to win every Sunday.
Streak Survivor Pool
We saved the best for the last. Covers Streak Survivor pool has been around for over a decade with contestants regularly cashing tens of thousands of dollars. The grand prize is $100,000 cash and it’s awarded anytime a user picks 25 consecutive winners.
Best part is participants don’t have to limit themselves to one sport. Cross-sport selections are permitted for contestants in Streak Survivor.
You can learn more about Covers Streak Survivor Pool on the contest rules page.
