NFL Survivor Pool

Noone picked Thursday night, so tomorrow (Sunday) is going to be the true start of the season for those of you in the pool.

I’ve processed the mail from today, so all checks that can be received have been received.  If you are still marked as unpaid (your name is italics) and you were paying by check, then your check is going to arrive too late. Sorry. You will have to pay via Paypal by the deadline or else your name will be removed from the pool on Sunday.

For everyone else, all picks must be submitted by Sunday at 10am ET.  Anyone who hasn’t paid their entry fees yet must pay via Paypal by the same deadline.  Refer to the previous post on how to submit your picks.

When sending by Paypal, make sure you have a back-up funding source like a credit or debit card when you send the payment. This will cause Paypal to send your transaction as an Instant transfer, which means that the funds show up in my account immediately.  If you do not have a back-up funding source, Paypal will send it as an eCheck instead, which means that Paypal won’t clear the transaction (and I don’t receive the funds) until the funds clear your banking institution, which can take 5-7 business days.

I’ve made a few enhancements to the site over the last few days:

1. The scores are now going to be updated automatically. I used to enter the scores manually so they didn’t always get updated in a prompt manner, but during the offseason I wrote a script to pull the scores feed from ESPN.  However, I hadn’t been able to test it until Thursday night’s game since the feed hasn’t had any scores to report. It seems to be working, so now it’ll run at the top and bottom of every hour, every day, except for Sunday when it’ll run every two minutes between 3pm and midnight. I’ll adjust the schedule if I need to as the season progresses.
2. If there is a Thursday night game, but the weekly deadline isn’t until Sunday, previously you couldn’t see who won/lost on the Thursday game until all picks were revealed on Sunday. I’ve made a change so that once the final score of the early game is recorded (from the scores feed in #1), the site will show those picks.
3. There is also now a script that will run on Sunday mornings to help me assign picks to players who don’t make their picks on time. It will pull the latest spreads from linesmaker.com and assign a favored team to anyone who doesn’t have a pick entered. Around 11:30am, it will then automatically flip the flag to reveal all of the picks for the week. (The 90 minute cushion is mainly for my benefit, to give me time to verify that everything looks good.)

So for you players that were notorious last year for forgetting to make your picks, note that last year I assigned the missing picks quasi-manually.  I looked for heavier favored teams and fed those lines to the script that then made the assignments.

This year, the script will go from the top down, and for each player it will use the first available team it finds (available team = favored team that the player hasn’t used yet). For week one, that means players will be assigned the Falcons, since that is the first game listed on linesmaker.com.

Good luck!

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