2020 National Football League Pools

Happy New Year to one and all Ladies and Gentlemen. Hard to believe the League is swinging around again! Most of you will be familiar with the format of the competition, but for any newbies, the rules are the same as previous pools, see below;


1. At the start of the week, I will post up the fixtures for the coming weekend and by midweek I should have the league table of posters and points for the previous week just gone.

2. Latecomers will be accepted but points will be forfeited for any games missed.

3. Predictions will be accepted and valid by throw-in time of the first game of the weekend. The first game this season throws in at at 5pm on Saturday, January 25th. Any predictions for this game made after this time will not count (but any predictions made for other games not yet started will still count).

4. The points system I am using is similar to that used in the League and Championship pools of previous seasons.
You get 2 points for predicting the winner of the game. Should a poster predict within 2 points of the winning margin, that poster will receive 1 bonus point.
Should a poster correctly predict a draw, the poster will receive 3 points.
Where a poster predicts a team to win but the result is a draw, the poster will get 1 point ONLY if the poster has predicted a winning margin of no more than 1 point.
I'll award one point if a person predicts a draw yet the result is a one point win for either side.
Needless to say, if you predict a team to win and they lose you get no points.

5. Bonus points will be awarded at the end of the league for predicting the correct teams who get promoted and relegated respectively. More points will be available on prediction of the winner of the league finals. You get 2 points for each correct prediction for promotion, relegation and League Champion.
Note: to those joining after the first set of fixtures are finished, these bonus point predictions can still be made, but a 25% penalty for each week missed will apply.

6. Posters must predict promotions/relegations in their first post with their first round of predictions. I will provide the league tables to aid in decision making.

7. To cut out a lot of time, if posters consistently fail to post their weekly predictions, I'll remove them from the overall tables.

8. If a poster makes two (or more) predictions for the same game week, the latest of these sets of predictions will count regardless of the score of each set.

As I said, I'll aim to have the table from the previous weekend's fixtures up by the middle of each week.