NFL Pick 'Em, in plain English
One winner per game, plus a Monday-night score. Winners, not priced bets.
Plain English
NFL Pick 'Em is a weekly pool sheet: one straight-up winner for every game on the slate, plus a predicted Monday-night final score as the tiebreaker. Roughly sixteen picks make up a full week. These are winners rather than priced bets — no spread, no odds, no stake — which makes the card a different exercise from the Empire's graded selections, and it is kept on its own sheet for exactly that reason. The card posts on Wednesday and is refreshed before Sunday as injuries and lineups settle.
New to any of this? Read the plain-English glossary — model, agent, hallucination, backtest, edge, closing line and the rest, defined in one place.
Questions people actually ask
The Empire posts one straight-up winner for every game on the week's NFL slate, around sixteen picks, plus a predicted final score for the Monday-night game as a tiebreaker. It is a pool sheet in the traditional sense: you are picking who wins, not betting a number. The card publishes on Wednesday and gets a refresh before the Sunday games.
Straight up means simply who wins the game, with no handicap. Against the spread means the favourite has to win by more than a set margin for the bet to cash. A team can be a great straight-up pick and a bad pick against the spread at the same time — which is why a pool sheet and a priced betting record are not comparable.
Because in a sixteen-game pool, several entries usually finish on the same number of correct picks. The predicted final score of the last game of the week breaks that tie by closest total, which is standard pool practice. It also forces a specific, falsifiable prediction rather than a hedge.
The Wednesday card is the early view, and a refresh posts before the Sunday slate once injury and lineup news has settled; the page shows its own status and tells you which version you are looking at. Late-week movement is exactly why the refresh exists — an early card published on Wednesday is a genuine prediction, not a guess made with Sunday's information.
No. Pick 'Em carries no prices, no stakes and no entry fee; the Empire does not run a paid pool, hold funds or pay out. It is a free weekly exercise for members, and any pool you enter elsewhere with these picks is entirely your own arrangement.
Because unpriced winners and priced bets measure different skills, and mixing them would flatter both. Picking favourites straight up is easy to do at a high percentage and tells you almost nothing about whether a bet was worth its price. Pick 'Em therefore keeps its own scorecard, and the one card that was record-eligible is reported as such rather than blended in.
Free weekly pool sheet. Straight-up winners, not priced bets, and not betting advice. The Empire runs no paid pool and holds no funds. Sports content is 21+ where legal — 1-800-GAMBLER.