How it works

The game

Every NFL club carries about 90 players through training camp and has to be at 53 by the league deadline. That means roughly 37 cuts per team, and the last handful of spots are genuinely contested. Predicting them is the game.

You pick one team. You get their real camp roster, updated automatically from ESPN. You mark 53 keeps. At the deadline everything locks. Once the real rosters settle, every board is scored automatically.

Who is eligible

Only players on the active camp roster can be picked. Anyone on injured reserve, PUP, NFI or suspension is shown separately and left out, because those designations do not occupy one of the 53 active spots. Rosters run a little above or below 90 on any given day as clubs sign and waive players, which is normal.

Scoring

Your board and the real roster are both 53 names, so a straight count of correct keeps says everything: get 48 right and you also missed 5. That number is your hits.

Hits alone reward playing it safe, because most of a 53 is obvious. So the headline number is edge: every player is worth more the more the crowd got them wrong. Correctly keeping a player almost everyone cut is worth a lot. Correctly keeping a franchise quarterback is worth almost nothing, because so did everyone else. Difficulty is measured from the submitted boards themselves, after lock, so it cannot be gamed while predictions are open.

Ties on edge break on hits, then on fewest consensus busts, then on whoever submitted first.

Edge is exactly comparable inside one team, where everyone faced the same roster and the same crowd. It is not comparable between teams, so the overall table ranks on plain hits instead, with edge as the tiebreak. Camp rosters run from 75 to 92 players, so a smaller one is a slightly easier guess.

Boards that are identical to another board from the same connection, or more than three boards for one team from one connection, are dropped before anything is scored, so nobody can bend the consensus everyone else is measured against.

More than one board

You can keep up to six boards for the same team, which is the point if you want to try carrying three quarterbacks and see what it costs elsewhere. One of them is starred as your ranked board, and that is the only one the leaderboard scores. The rest are alternates: still yours, still visible to other people, just not competing.

It works that way because ranking every board would make submitting six boards beat submitting one good one. About 37 of the 53 spots are genuinely uncertain, so best-of-six would win on volume alone. Alternates are also left out of the consensus, so nobody can push a player's keep rate around by repeating themselves.

Seeing everyone else's boards

Every team page has two tabs: Your board and All boards. Submit a board and the second tab opens up: every other board for that team, how many of your 53 each one agrees with, and the share of the field keeping each player. Pick any row to lay that board over yours and see exactly where you differ. After the deadline it is open to everyone, whether they entered or not.

Commit first, then look. That is what keeps it fair: you cannot see the field until your own picks are locked in. It is also why there is nothing much to gain by peeking. Before anyone is graded, there is no way to tell a good board from a bad one, and the one thing you can see, the consensus, scores exactly average by construction under the edge score.

The deadline

Boards lock at the league's cutdown deadline. You can change your picks as often as you like until then. After it passes, nothing new is accepted, including by anyone clever with a browser console: the cutoff is enforced by the database clock, not yours.

Where the data comes from

Rosters come from ESPN's public API and are refreshed on a schedule. Around the deadline the refresh runs frequently so the real 53s get captured as clubs announce them. ESPN lags real transactions by minutes to hours, so scoring waits until a club's roster actually settles rather than grading a half-processed roster.

Accounts

There are none. You choose a display name when you submit. Your board is kept in your browser so you can come back to it, and submitted boards are stored so the leaderboard can exist. See privacy.