It is football season for us here in the states, and for my network of friends and colleagues this will lock down every Sunday for the next 17 weeks. Though I don’t have the capacity to participate in fantasy football, my friends have long contributed to a football pool where we pick the winners for each week and put some money on the line to make it interesting. Our biggest problem was the manual process for gathering picks, and my unwillingness to pay for such as software solution.
Instead, I rolled up my sleeves built a very simple Xcelsius tool capable of capturing and exporting my weekly picks using the latest CSV Connector component. Like any dashboard, project once the end users gets a taste for what is possible with Xcelsius the real requirements begin to pour in. Somewhere in the middle, I ended up with what I am calling my NFL Personal Football Pool Manager (shown below).
The idea is simple:
1. Load and navigate the 17 week schedule one week at a time
2. Capture the user’s picks for the winner of each game
3. Save the picks so they can be recalled throughout the entire season
4. Allow a user to export the picks for any week
5. Load the scores and compare the results to the picks
6. Display the results for each week
7. Don’t allow anyone to cheat!!
If you have your own football pool and want to track your picks, or want to have your entire group use this, I offer it online free of charge. Based on the usage, we may decide to take this several steps further to increase the value. Your feedback and ideas are always appreciated!
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