What This Site Is
This site is a place to host your football pool. Everyone in the pool gets an account that they use to log in and make their picks, and you (as the pool administrator) have control over a number of options. E-mail reminders are sent out, scores are updated automatically in real time, winners are tabulated, and season-long rankings are kept. The site also contains full information (scores, spreads, etc) on all games played since 1997, allowing you to research your picks before you make them.
Who "We" Are
Despite frequent use of the "royal we", MyFootballPool.com is created, developed, designed, and maintained by one person - me, Ross Snyder. I'm a computer programmer by trade (which helps explain the site's minimalist design) and this website is a place for me to combine things I enjoy - namely, football pools and web programming.
Why I Do It
Because it's fun! I enjoy playing in football pools, and web programming isn't a job to me, it's an obsession. This website allows me to indulge myself, dabble in new technologies, experiment with user interface design, and hopefully come up with something that's both easy to use and fun for others. Since I do it all myself, it costs next to nothing to run and I'm able to offer everything 100% for free.
History (short version)
In 2002, I took over running my company's football pool. To that point, it involved everyone making picks on paper, giving them to the pool organizer, and entering the picks by hand into Excel. This struck me as far too tedious, so I began work on a website that would allow everyone to enter their picks themselves, view everyone else's picks once the games started, etc. I used my website to host two pools in the 2003 season, one for work and one for my friends. Then I started hosting other people's pools, added more pool types and features, and the site grew into what it is today.
History (long version)
To trace the full history of this site, one has to go back to my childhood. My father was a teacher, and one of the other teachers ran a weekly football pool that cost $1 to enter. Dad often let me make his picks for him, and I eventually graduated to my own entry. In 6+ years of playing, I never won once! Still, I always had fun with it, agonizing over my picks and keeping track of how many I got right.
Jump to 2001, when I was done with college and working in the real world. I signed up for the "unofficial" company football pool and was intrigued to find that the organizer would e-mail around the full grid of everyone's picks by Friday evening. This way, come Sunday, you could track how you were doing, relative to everyone else.
As a math/programming geek with too much time on his hands, I decided to write a program that would read in the matrix of everyone's picks and tell me which scenarios had to happen for me to win. This program was nothing major - I showed it to a few other people, but only used it for fun. However, it laid the foundation for the idea that would become this website.
Midway through 2002, I was still in my company pool when the pool organizer was going on vacation and needed someone to step in for a week. I volunteered and became the new permanent organizer, gathering everyone's picks and putting them into Excel for the remainder of the season. I quickly grew tired of entering picks by hand and hounding people to get their picks to me by the deadline. So, in service of the programmer's virtues of laziness and impatience, I decided to make a website where everyone could enter picks themselves and they'd show up automatically. I soon incorporated my earlier program that would calculate each person's odds of winning as the games finished.
The first iteration of the website came together during the summer of 2003. That fall, about 60 people used it, and that number has grown each year since.
What's Next?
MyFootballPool.com is my baby. I enjoy working on it a great deal and have a lot of big ideas for the future. I hope more people continue to use and enjoy it, and reap some benefit from my work.