The 2019 Farside Football Pool

The Farside’s Second Bye Season

Welcome to the Farside, Mr. Bond.

The Farside Football Pool is taking the 2019 season off. It would otherwise be our 24th season!

Entering the Pool

1. Print an Entry Sheet You can get one here: Printable Week 1 Schedule sheet This is a handy printable PDF entry sheet with the games all listed, team records and even sparklines, which get more useful as the season rolls on. Print this thing out, sit down with a cup of coffee, and work out your picks on paper. Then...
2. Go Online and Enter right here on the Week 1 Entry Form. It’s easy; find your name in the dropdown list, enter your password, make your selections (use each weighting only once!), pick a tiebreaker, and then hit the Submit button at the bottom. Don't forget that password! (probably best to use some form of your name). Returning this year: The Thursday Pick Six! If you don't get your Thursday pick in I will make an automatic selection for you. There is no Thursday game this week and thus no Pick Six pick.
3. Check Your Entry I will send you a confirming email when I import your entry into the spreadsheet. Check to make sure your picks are what you expected. If they’re not, it’s because either a) you put them in wrong or b) someone else got a bit sloppy in selecting names and inadvertently sent in an entry as yours. This is where that password thing comes in handy. Please note that this confirmation won’t happen instantly--it comes when I put the entries in the spreadsheet, not when you submit them.

Checking The Results

I post the entries late in the week and the results as the games finish and time allows. The timing and frequency of these updates depends on how nice the weather is, the difficulties my lawnmowers/snowblower/string trimmer/chainsaw/attic wiring/bicycle fleet is giving me, how much attention I’m paying to the games, etc. It also depends on whether or not I’m in town; you can expect some delays at Thanksgiving or other times I’m gone.

• The final results for Week 1 are posted here: Week 1 Final Results (Week 1 High Stakes Final Results ). If you're paper-oriented, print these on legal paper and they’re actually pretty legible. In Acrobat, it can help to increase the magnification a bit. You can see last season's final results by going to Week 1 Family Results and Week 1 High Stakes Results . You can of course see the game scores, recaps and official Gamebooks by looking at the NFL's Score Sheets for Week 17 which includes the superb Big Play Alerts graphic. If you find my results pages of numbers confusing, a quick explanation might help. Take a look at How to Read the Farside scoresheets and see if that clarifies matters.
• Family Pool Potential Outcomes and High Stakes Pool Potential Outcomes for the week are posted here. These are evaluated when there are up to eight undecided NFL games left (yielding 2^8, or 256, different outcomes) and lists all the people who could still win the week and the teams they need to win in each game. It only has much relevance from mid-afternoon Sunday until the Monday Night Football game and, again, is dependent on me not having anything better to do. The most recent version was posted Tuesday 1/2/18 8:04 PM CST . Not on the list? Bummer. Of course, there aren't any Outcomes calculated right now.
• The Plot of Dots for the Family Pool and High Stakes Pool show the scatter of everybody’s weekly versus seasonal scores. Each point is a participant, identified by initials (check the Who Are These People? page to see what your initials are). The points coloured green are people who have won a week this season. See how you compare to the other participants on the weekly and seasonal point totals, if you dare.
• Show Me The Family Money and Show Me The High Stakes Money . Who won what when. If you are interested, you can see how often people have won over the years, or at least the last fifteen seasons, by going to the A History of Winning (and the High Stakes Version of the History). Those numbers are the weeks the person won, and 1st, 2nd and 3rd show the seasonal rankings.
• Who Are These People? is a list of the participants, their abbreviations on the scoresheet, where they are, who they are and what their current rank is. You can also look at the Family Participants Ranked in Seasonal Order and High Stakes Participants Ranked in Seasonal Order to see how the everyone is doing seasonally in their respective pools. To help fuel bitter internicine debate, you can refer to the Family Units and How They're Doing and even do cross-pool, intra-family trash talking!
• Deadspin is a snarky look at sports generally, and has a feature on every single team in the NFL and why they suck. You can read the previews for the Vikings, Packers or Bears. I can summarize for you: your dumpster fire of a team plays in a soulless concrete morgue with overpriced beer surrounded by a desolate windblown landscape. Your coach is a serial incompetent, your owner is a possibly-criminal old white guy who threatens to move to get new stadiums every 20 years and your fans are a bunch of toothless fat stupid drunken racist morons who beat up 9 year olds wearing the opponent's jerseys plus they pee in the sink and puke on the sidewalk. You're a fool to show loyalty to them. There, that's the gist of them, but they're still kind of fun.
• The Onion's Sports section provides its usual deep insights into all sports including the NFL. (e.g. NFL Announces New Zero-Tolerance Policy On Videotaped Domestic Violence)

Studying Up: Team Schedules, News, Weather and Farside Pool History

The Metrodome Comes Down  In a scene reminiscent of the Vikings' history over the years, the Metrodome collapses in the post-season. Minneapolis, February 23, 2014.

• NFL Team Schedules: Arizona to Kansas City Each team’s schedule with opponents, game scores, home, away and total records and checkmarks by the team’s wins so you can see the winning streaks clearly.
• NFL Team Schedules: Miami to Washington Same thing for the back half of the alphabet. Follow the Vikes as they strive for respectability while awaiting their new stadium.
• The Opponent Records figure shown on the printable entry sheet is each team’s opponents’ records against other teams. It can be tough to explain, but now I have a page on each team’s opponent records. They’re all linked from this page. Enjoy!
• 2015 Schedule Notes makes note of the some of the changes for this season, like a slight shift in afternoon game times, early games nearly every week, three games in London this year, etc.
• So which game’s on, anyway? the506.com does superb broadcast maps of the nation showing what’s on where. Please don’t tell me we get Buffalo at Baltimore! Oh no! There is also a detailed description of how the decisions are made about which markets get which broadcasts.
• If you want pearls of Football Wisdom from someone who remains winless in his own pool for years on end, you can always follow me on Twitter: Follow @FarsidePool
• I like working with large geospatial data sets. One of the most brilliant maps I’ve seen is this choropleth Map of primary NFL team support by county based on Facebook "likes", done in 2012. It shows the country’s 3,077 counties’ favorite NFL teams. The Jets have just one county in Long Island; Wisconsin is solid green for the Packers; Iowa is torn between Chicago, the Vikes, the Pack and Kansas City (look carefully at the shades of blue and hope you’re not color-blind); Florida reflects the non-native origins of its elderly residents; the Steelers’ yellow pops up all over. It’s a nifty use of a massive data set.
• The Current NFL Weather Conditions shows the current time and temperature in each NFL city. See how grim it’s going to be in Tempe or Green Bay, depending on the time of year. Hey, when you gotta Dome, it’s always 75 and nice, at least until the roof falls in. The page also has direct links to each team’s local newspaper’s Sports section, if they still have a newspaper.
• The Archives The Farside Pool Week by Week for this season and for past ones. Relive past glories, revisit old miseries. You can also see prior seasons’ team results as if they’re relevant in this free-agent age.
• For the terminally bored, there’s always Matt’s Flickr Photostream to look at our photos. Oh boy, a kitty cat!

New to the Pool?

You can read a Description of the Pool including some rules and stuff. This is most useful if you are new to the Farside or if it’s raining outside and it’s Buffalo at Baltimore! on the tube and you’re really bored.

Page last updated 8/19/2018