How to Play ESPN College Pick 'em

ESPN College Pick 'em is an immensely popular fantasy college football game. More than 300,000 entries are posted every season. College Pick 'em is different than other fantasy and college football pool games. Every week players are given ten college football match ups. They must pick the winners and rank the games from one to ten. If players pick the winner of a game they get the number of points they designated for that game.

Instructions

    • 1

      Sign up for College Pick 'em. You can find the game at the ESPN website (see Resources). You will need to create a user name and password.

    • 2

      Invite your friends to join you. It is no fun playing alone. College Pick 'em is very exciting from week to week as the results come in and you assess how you rank. You can see how you performed against everyone in the game, but it is far more fulfilling to compete against your friends. Bragging rights are priceless. Your friends need to create user names and passwords for themselves.

    • 3

      Join or create a group. Thousands of groups are formed by players of College Pick 'em. Some are public. Some are private. Anyone can join a public game and compete against others in the group. Private groups require an invitation. You can create your own private group and invite your friends or accept a friend's invitation to their group. Your one College Pick 'em entry can be included in multiple groups.

    • 4

      Take a look at the selected games. College Pick 'em releases the match ups at 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Mondays during the college football season. Many of the games are high profile ranked opponents. Some match ups are obscure pairings with teams you may have never heard of. ESPN likes to mix it up to keep you guessing. Since ABC owns ESPN, the games tend to be ones aired on ABC or one of the ESPN channels. They usually won't ignore a big match up even if it is on another network.

    • 5

      Decide who you think will win each game. There is plenty of statistical information available to help you make your choices. If you click on a team name it will take you to a web page containing all kinds of data on the team. You can also see what percent of players picked which team at the "Who Picked Whom" link.

    • 6

      Assign a value to each game. Give the game where you are most sure of your pick a 10. Assign the game you are least sure of a 1. Distribute the rest of the numbers based on your confidence. In College Pick'em the ranking of your choices is often more important than picking winners. If you get nine picks right but lose your 10 point game, you will do the same as someone who only picked six games correctly but lost games ranked 1, 2, 3 and 4 points.

    • 7

      Predict a score for your tie breaker. College Pick 'em selects one game a week to be a tie breaker in case more than one player gets the high score. This is usually the last game of the day. Enter how many points you think each team will score. The player who gets the most points and is closest to the final score wins the week. There is no prize for a weekly winner but there is one for the season long champion. This is usually a wide screen TV. Scores accumulate throughout the college football season.

    • 8

      Submit your entry by clicking the "submit" button below your picks. Your entry is locked at the deadline. This is usually noon Eastern Time on Saturday. You can not make any more changes after your entry is locked.

    • 9

      Watch the results come in. Your Saturdays watching college football will be more exciting than ever as you cheer on your picks. Results and rankings are updated in real time throughout the day. Once the games are over you will be counting the hours until you can make your next picks on Monday.