What is Underdog Football?
We're huge football fans. Every year, we play all kinds of games that make our season more interesting. Fantasy football, pick'em leagues, betting the lines, all of it. We want something fun to talk about every day of the week.
We’ve found that every system has pros and cons.
Fantasy is great, until your star QB gets pulled just when you need a few more points to pull off a victory.
Pick'em leagues are fun, but it's hard to stay in the money once you have a single bad week. Even worse, sometimes the picks are obvious. You'll get weeks where the scores for the whole league might only vary by one or two points. Once you've fallen behind it becomes harder and harder to make up points, and sometimes you can be out of the race by mid-season.
Against the spread leagues are the hardest of the bunch, since you don't have to worry about the winner as much as you have to worry about how much a team wins (or loses) by. These leagues can feel odd because it is weird to root for a team to lose by “just enough". Even when your team wins, YOU lose if your team doesn't score enough points to cover the line.
Ok, so what makes Underdog Football different?
I'm glad you asked...
Underdog Football keeps the simplicity of a straight up pick'em league and rewards players for making smarter, riskier, picks.
Here's how it works...
Main picks
Each week you'll make 5 picks.
A 25 point pick, 20, 15, 10, and 5 pick.
These aren’t wagers. These points do not come out of your overall point total. They are a pool of potential points you are playing with each week.
Each game can be a "straight up" pick, which means you pick the winner of the game, not whether the team covers the point spread.
Every game carries with it a "bonus" value based on the point spread, which modifies the points you receive if your pick wins the game.
For example, Carolina is playing Oakland in Carolina. The Underdog Formula +/-(which we use for our point spreads) has Carolina as a 14.5 point favorite in the game.
If you wanted to pick Carolina (and who wouldn't last season) you could use one of your picks. Remember, they don't have to cover the point spread, they just have to win. This seems like an easy pick!
However, because Carolina is a heavy favorite, you get less points if they win.
The Underdog Formula +/- is subtracted from the points.
If you felt like Oakland was going to pull the upset you'd be rewarded because you would get the Underdog Formula +/- value added to your pick.
Seems easy enough, let's recap!
Every Wednesday the new point spreads are posted and it' time to make your picks. One 25, 20, 15, 10, and 5 point picks whose values are either increased, or decreased based on the point spread of the game.
If your team wins the game (regardless of how much they win by) you win!
That's as hard as it gets. Each week the value of your picks depends solely on how you distribute your points. Play it safe for fewer points or risk it on picking an underdog and piling on the points when you hit it big.