Here are the latest office football pool features we’ve added for the 2017 NFL season. We strive to be the best NFL online office pool manager, and as always welcome any suggestions you may have to improve your experience at OfficePoolStop.com!
New League Manager Features
- Annotation notes – Managers can now save notes for each player on the Player Accounts page. For example, you might put a note under someone that reads “Ted also paid league fee for daughter Amy”.
- Branding. Want your own logo and background color to show on the site when your players are logged in? You can now do this from your control panel. You can also specify a short link, such as wkrp-radio, so that when someone enters in officepoolstop.com/wkrp-radio it takes them to your league home page. Better yet, you could then register a URL name of your choosing, such as wkrp-nflpool.com to link to the shortname URL. This is one of only two premium services at officepoolstop.com ($15/season; the other premium service is credit card processing that allows your players to pay your league fee from the website). Of course the vast number of the other features like always are free!
- New tie-breaker option – For football pickem and confidence leagues, you can now specify a “chop” option. This will split winnings when players tie for a prize.
- Specify default timezone – Managers can now set a default time zone that is used anywhere a date string is displayed, such as the picks due date on the football pick sheet. Players can still set their own default time zone that overrides the manager default.
New Confidence Pool Features
Our NFL Confidence pools received a ton of lovin’ this off-season!
- You can now drag&drop teams to weight values, or weight values to teams. You’ll still have the option to enter in the weights manually if you want.
- You now have a quick picks option to select all home teams or all favorites on the NFL confidence pick sheet.
- The confidence pool standings table will now update real-time on Sunday and show where everyone stands for that week. Previously only the picks section of the standings page updated real-time.
- You can specify points to subtract for losses (either the assigned weight or a fixed value).
- Want to run a Pick 5 football pool? You can now limit the number of games required to be picked each week. The weights adjust accordingly. For example, if you set your pool to 5 picks a week, the allowed weights will be 1 through 5.
- We added a legend to your confidence league standings page to better explain things like SOV (strength of victory) and TB (total tie-breakers).
- You can now configure your league to use the spread.
- You can disable the tie-breaker option on the pick sheet.
New Football Pickem Pool Features
Our NFL Pickem Pools remain the most popular pool on our site and had several nice enhancements for 2017.
- Like our confidence pools, you now have a quick picks option to select all home teams or all favorites on your NFL Pick’em pick sheet.
- The pickem pool standings table on the standings page will now update real-time on Sunday and show where everyone currently stands that day. Previously only the picks section of the pickem standings page updated real-time.
- We also added a legend to your NFL pickem standings page to explain that ever illusive SOV (strength of victory) and TB (total tie-breakers).
- Autopick now includes auto-selection of key games (if the key games feature is enabled).
- You can disable the tie-breaker option on the pick sheet.
New Play Money Features
Play Money pools have low turnover because you are never really out of contention until late in the season.
- More flexible configuration to allow additional wagers after a previously selected game has been played.
- You can disable the tie-breaker option on the pick sheet.
New Survivor Pool Features
Nothing major this year for our popular and feature-rich NFL Survivor Pools, ya’ll must be happy with what you already get! We did improve the player picks legend on the survivor pool standings page, plus some other minor tweaks.
Coming this year: NFL Margin Pool
We’ve added NFL Margin Pool support to our site, which is expected to be rolled out by August 14th!
Miscellaneous Improvements
There are other minor improvements here and there:
- Players in more than one league will not only get the email reminder to make picks, but they will also be reminded on the home, pick, and standings page if they have another league that still needs picks submitted.
We improved the overall performance of the website with some Content Delivery Network (CDN) changes. We also switched to Everleap hosting, renowned for faster speeds of ASP.NET based websites.
Also be sure to check out our proprietary NFL Play Money Pool that is our fastest growing pool in popularity. Visit our forum if you have ideas or suggestions you would like to share!