Rules

Entering

• Free to play. No purchase necessary and no purchase improves your chance of winning. No entry fee, no buy-in, and no paid tier that scores you better. Nothing here is gambling, and there is never money on a player's performance.
• You need an account to submit picks, but not to read anything. Sign in with email or Google — there's no password to remember. Use your message board handle as your display name if you want.
• One entry per person. Multiple accounts to get multiple entries will be removed from the standings.
• You must be 18 or older.
• Picks lock 10 minutes before kickoff — each game's own scheduled kickoff, so the deadline moves with the schedule. Once a game locks you can't submit for it at all. After the lock, everyone's picks reveal at the same moment — yours, mine, and the model's. Nobody sees anyone else's number first.
• Each week opens the morning after the previous week's games. You predict the week in front of you, not the whole season in August.
• You can change your picks as many times as you like until the lock. The last version you submit is the one that counts, and changing it costs you nothing.
• Miss a week and you score zero for it. There's no penalty beyond that, and you're back in the following week.
• Join whenever. You'll be behind in the season race, but weekly prizes reset, so your first week is the same as everyone's first week.

Scoring

You predict the final score of each NC State game. Score error means both teams' misses added together — if you say 24–20 and it finishes 27–17, that's 3 + 3 = 6.

Winner points are awarded on their own, so a rough prediction on the right team beats a close one on the wrong team.

A perfect week is 60 — 25 for the band, 20 for the exact score, 10 for the winner, 5 for entering. Participation points count toward the season total like any other point. They're deliberately small: 5 can't decide a week between two people who both showed up. What they do is stop a bad week reading as elimination.

Your score prediction is where almost all of it comes from — 55 of a possible 60 in a week. The other 5 is for showing up.

Preseason Bonus — Predict the Record

Before the season starts, predict NC State's final regular-season record — wins and losses across all 12 games. You get 10 points just for submitting a prediction, and 25 bonus points at the end of the season if you nail the exact record.

It locks before Game 1, so it has to be in before the season starts — that is the whole point of it. Make your prediction.

Weekly winner

Highest total that week — your score prediction plus the 5 for entering. Every game has a weekly winner, all twelve of them, including UNC week.

• Prize is a Pack Predictions hat.
• Win more than one week and it's up to you whether you want another hat.
• Winning any of the first eleven games also earns a seat in the Winners Circle.

Winners Circle

The weekly winners of the eleven games before UNC week qualify. On November 28 those qualifiers compete against each other on the North Carolina game for the top prize.

• Scored exactly like a normal week — same picks, same points. The only difference is that the standings are gated to qualifiers.
• One seat per person. Winning three weeks doesn't give you three seats, so a hot streak makes the final round smaller rather than stacking it in your favour.
• UNC week still has its own weekly winner, open to everyone. It's possible to win both.
• Qualification is shown on the leaderboard all season, so you can always see who's in.

Season champion

Most points across all twelve games — every week's score prediction plus the points for entering, added together.

The two races are genuinely separate. You can win five weeks and lose the season, or never win a week and take the season on consistency.

Who can win

Three entries appear in the standings all season for comparison, and none of them can win anything:

The site operator and all automated entries are ineligible for prizes. Numbered ranks count readers only, so those three never cost you a place. My own picks lock and reveal on exactly the same clock as everyone else's — I have access to the database, and that shared clock is the only thing that makes my row worth anything.

Ties

Everything below is worked out from what's already recorded — your scores, your combined error, and when you submitted. Nothing is decided by hand, and nothing needs a judgement call from me.

Weekly winner

One prize per week. If entries finish the week level on points, these are applied in order, stopping at the first one that separates them:

1. Most points that week.
2. Lowest combined error on the game.
3. Earliest submission of the pick that counts.

That always ends at exactly one winner, so the weekly prize is never shared.

Qualifying for the Winners Circle is decided before any of that runs. Everyone tied on points qualifies — the tiebreakers above only decide who receives the prize. So a week can have four qualifiers and one prize. That is correct, not a mistake: the Circle field is set by how well you scored, and the hat is a physical object that has to go to one person.

Wherever a weekly winner is shown, the tie depth is shown with it — how far down the cascade the week went and how many entries were level at that point.

Season champion

If two entries finish the season on the same points, these are applied in order, stopping at the first one that separates them:

1. Most points across the season.
2. Most weekly wins.
3. Lowest combined error across the season.
4. Most exact final scores.
5. Still level? Co-champions.

Winners Circle

The Circle is decided on the North Carolina game alone, so its cascade is shorter:

1. Most points on the UNC game.
2. Lowest combined error on that game.
3. Still level? Co-champions.

Combined error is both teams' misses added together — the same number the scoring bands are built from. The season title and the Circle are unchanged: both are decided by the cascades above, and a tie that survives every tier there is shared rather than settled arbitrarily. Only the weekly prize runs to a single winner.

When things go wrong

They will. Here's how I'll handle it.

• Your picks are the record, not the confirmation email. Every submission is saved and timestamped, and you'll get an email receipt. If the email doesn't arrive, your pick still counts — check your entry on the site to confirm what was recorded.
• Scoring mistakes get corrected publicly, with a note saying what changed and why. I won't quietly fix a leaderboard.
• Rule changes take effect the following week, never retroactively. If something needs fixing mid-season, the weeks already played stand as scored.