Hey folks, long-time lurker here who has an office pool question that doesn’t really fit in on the other boards (MSB maybe), so I decided to post here.

I’ve been asked to take over a very stale office football pool at work. How stale? Well, the “contest” in years past has been to pick a Div I-A college team and…that’s it. Single point per victory, no tiebreakers (WTF-?), with all of the “winners” sharing a title as if this were Fun Fair Positive Soccer.

Making this contest more challenging sounds easier than it is, actually, as many in my office are what I’ll politely call “very, extremely passive” fans. The goal here is to create something fun, a bit more comprehensive so as to not bore me and other fans to tears yet not so much that it causes these low information voter types here to not participate (it is an employee engagement activity, after all).

Anyway, to my idea, such as it is:

• Pick one highly-publicized pre-season major college poll (say, ESPN’s CFB Power Index) and pre-season NFL power ranking (ESPN NFL Power Rankings on ESPN.com)
• Break all major college and NFL teams into groups (4, 6, 8…haven’t decided how many just yet)
• Assign each college group and NFL group a weighted value for each game they win on their real-world schedules
• Make each participant adopt both a college team and an NFL team for the length of the contest (14 weeks, Labor Day wkend thru Thanksgiving wkend)
• Weekly scores are tabulated by multiplying any wins earned by the winning team’s preseason group weight
• Cumulative points leader wins in the end

Here is a link to what an eight-team per sport (16 total) grouped weighted points structure might look:

I like it because it’s very low maintenance for me administratively, and it involves more strategy (not saying much) than in previous years. What I’m struggling with is finding the right number of team groups to minimize the chances of multiple winners at the end. Is eight overkill? Four just right?

Tiebreaker can be to make all mathematically alive owners heading into the final week predict the score of their college/NFL team games for that week.

Thoughts other than smart arse comments are very welcome. TIA.