How the JuJu Cup works

Every week of the NFL regular season you pick a winner in every single game on the slate. Straight up — no point spread, no handicap. If you think the 2-9 team wins outright, take them.

Preseason does not count. Playoffs do not count. The JuJu Cup is eighteen weeks of regular-season football, week one through week eighteen.

A correct pick is worth one point. An incorrect pick is worth nothing.

NFL games can end in a tie. If a game you picked a side in ends level, you get nothing — whichever side you took. The tie was on the board the whole time and there was a way to call it. See The Hail Mary below.

Whoever has the most points when the final Monday night game ends wins that week and takes $20. Then the board resets and we go again.

Points decide the week. They do not decide the Cup — see below.

Games you never picked score zero. There is no partial credit for being busy.

Instead of picking a side, you can call a game to end in a tie. That is the Hail Mary, and it is the only way a tie ever pays. If the game actually finishes level you bank three points — triple what a correct pick pays. If it does not, you get nothing for that game.

You get one Hail Mary per week. The moment you call it on a game the option disappears from every other game on the sheet. Take it back off and it is available again anywhere you like — right up until the deadline.

Ties are genuinely rare — roughly one a season across the whole league — so this is exactly what it sounds like. Once the deadline passes your Hail Mary is spent for the week whether the game has been played or not.

The season champion is whoever calls the most games right between week one and week eighteen. Not the most weeks. Not the most points. Games.

So if you call 200 games right and only ever win one week, and somebody else calls 180 right but wins five weeks, the Cup is yours and it is not close. Winning a week is worth $20; being right more often than anybody else all year is worth the trophy and $200.

A cashed Hail Mary counts as one game called right in the season table, even though it paid three points in the week — you called one game, you got one game. Ties are broken by total points first, then by weekly wins.

Along with your picks you predict the combined points total of the week’s closing game — normally Monday night. If the schedule closes with two, you call both and we use the sum.

A week that ends level is settled in this order:

1. Most points. The week belongs to whoever scored the most, and usually that is the end of it.
2. Closest to the total. Whoever came nearest the actual combined total of the closing game takes the week. A sheet that never entered a total loses this step to anyone who did.
3. Whoever locked in first. Every save is stamped. Still level after the total, and the week goes to whoever had a complete sheet in earliest — all the games plus the total. A complete sheet always beats an incomplete one here, whatever the clock says, and your stamp is the last time you touched the sheet, so changing your mind at 5:58 PM costs you the tiebreaker.

A handful of weeks close on a full Sunday slate rather than a standalone nightcap. There is nothing sensible to predict in that case, so those weeks skip step two and go straight to the clock. The pick sheet says so at the top when it happens.

Picks are due at 6:00 PM Eastern on the day of the week’s first game. That is usually Thursday, but the NFL moves games — international kickoffs, holiday slates, Wednesday openers — so the deadline is computed from the actual first kickoff on the schedule, every week.

Once that clock hits zero, nothing changes. No exceptions. Not for flights, not for weddings, not for a phone that died. The pick sheet simply stops accepting writes.

One edge case, in your favour: if a week ever opens with a game that kicks off before 6:00 PM ET, the deadline moves up to that kickoff instead — so nobody can pick a game that is already being played. A Sunday 9:30 AM game from London moves the whole week’s deadline to 9:30 AM Sunday.

This is worth reading twice for the holiday weeks. Thanksgiving and Christmas do not get a week of their own — they land inside whatever week they fall in, and if the holiday game is that week’s opener, the whole week is due before it — which for a Thanksgiving week with a Wednesday night opener means the sheet is due Wednesday. The Commissioner posts an extra heads-up in the chat for any week that does not lock on a Thursday.

The whole season is on the board — you can open week 14 in September and see exactly who plays who. What you cannot do is pick it. A week only starts accepting picks once the week ahead of it is finished, so week 2 stays read-only until the last week 1 game is in the books.

Scout ahead all you like. You still have to make the call one week at a time, with everyone else.

Your sheet is private until one minute after the lock — 6:01 PM Eastern in an ordinary week. Not visible to other players, not visible to the commissioner, not sitting in the page source waiting to be read.

Then the whole board opens: every player’s picks, the consensus on each game, live standings, and running win probability.

$20 for the season, paid to the commissioner. One buy-in covers all eighteen weeks, and everybody’s buy-in goes into one pot.

$20 of that pot goes to the winner of every week — all 18 of them. It takes a genuine dead heat to split one: same points, same total, and both complete sheets stamped in the same instant. If that ever happens, they split it.

The Cup itself is worth $200 in cash, and it goes to whoever called the most games right across the season. That is a stated prize, not a leftover: it is funded for this first annual edition however many of us end up playing. The 18 weekly envelopes come out of the pot and the commissioner covers the rest.

Your picks count whether or not you have paid. The commissioner just keeps a list, and everybody can see it.

The Commissioner posts a countdown in the league chat four times before every deadline: 48 hours out, 24 hours out, 6 hours out, and 1 hour out. A short week gets whichever of those still fit.

At the one-hour mark, anyone who has not submitted a complete sheet gets named in the room. That is a feature, not a bug.

Every game on the pick sheet has a button that makes the call for you, and there is one for the whole week too. It is not a coin flip: the pool reads the sportsbook line and ESPN’s FPI projection for that game, blends them, and then rolls the dice weighted by what they say.

A 62% favorite comes up about 62 times in a hundred — which means the button hands you the underdog often enough to ruin your week. It only fills the sheet in; you still have to save it, and you can override anything it picks.

There is one chat thread for the whole season, open on every page from the button in the corner. Say what you want about anybody’s picks. You can reply to a message, and you can hang a 👍 👎 💩 💯 on one.

The room is not a back channel around the reveal — it shows nobody’s sheet. If you want the league to know what you took before 6:01, you have to type it yourself, and then you own it. The commissioner can pull a message; nobody, commissioner included, can edit one.

As games go final, the pool re-simulates the rest of the week thousands of times and publishes each player’s live chance of winning it, along with which remaining games swing the standings hardest and who needs what.

When the last game ends, an AI moderator writes the week up: the upsets, the coin flips that landed, the picks that aged badly, and a full and public accounting of last place.

The same moderator sits in the room as The Commissioner. It posts every final score as it lands, drops the recap in when the week closes, and every so often it reads what the league has been arguing about and says something. It only knows what the scoreboard knows — before the reveal it has no idea what anyone picked either.