The Greatest Football Pool Ever

Once upon a time I created the greatest football pool ever.

As a bartender at a thriving sports bar creating sports pools was something I enjoyed doing for my customers. Our regulars would have bet on which fly landed on the bar first so getting people to toss money into the pot was easy.

Let’s face it, football was made for gamblers. Point spreads, over/under’s, which team scores first, who wins the coin toss (my bookie hated me every Super Bowl for winning that bet) and a myriad of crazy alternative bets to make a Cleveland vs. Philadelphia game worth watching.

Cleveland vs. Philadelphia is why fantasy football was invented. Other than a local fan/masochist who would watch that game?

Over the years my regulars loved our pools, but at times I got a little bored with the same 100 squares pool. You know the pool. Ten rows down, ten rows across. Buy a square, fill the square with your name. After all 100 squares are filled numbers are drawn.

You also know what happens next.

Someone has to get 2/5, 6/5, 2/9 etc…. and the persons getting those numbers know they are screwed. Meanwhile, the person getting 0/0, 7/0, 3/7 is already planning on what they are doing with their winnings.

The quandary about the same “good” numbers usually winning bugged me for years. There had to be a way where everyone had an even shot at winning a football pool.

So one Thanksgiving evening, minutes before kickoff, the greatest football pool ever hit me.

WHAT TIME THE GAME ENDS POOL

It was simple. Instead of using the game score, my pool was truly arbitrary. It was based on time. The winning number was based on the actual minute the game ended.

The pool involved 10 people throwing in $20 each. $200 winner-take-all.

I wrote numbers 0–9 on slips of paper and the ten people picked a slip.

It you drew number 8, you wanted the game to end at 10:28, 10:38 pm, 10:48 pm etc…

At the beginning of the 4th quarter, I turned one TV behind the bar to the Weather Channel because they had the time at the bottom of the screen. Players watches or cell phones didn’t count. The sole time judge was the Weather Channel.

Suddenly 2 and 5 were just as good for winning numbers as 0 and 3 and 7.

That Thanksgiving night Dallas game was a doozy in the 4th quarter. Lead change after lead change. Time out after time out. Multiple stoppages for injuries. The 4th quarter took an hour as the pool players yelled and screamed at the TV’s while nervously eyeing the Weather Channel.

The last three minutes took over 30 minutes, which meant all 10 numbers in the pool cycled through three times. I’d never seen such anxiety over $200 in any pool I’d run before. Two of the participants didn’t even like football. But they liked money.

Many swears were swore. Players running out of bounds to stop the clock had their parentage questioned. The network was the devil for throwing in extra commercials at the two minute warning. The coach who called a time 0ut with three seconds to play in order to ice the kicker could have been choked by the person who was counting his winnings as the minute hand slipped to the next person.

By the time the game ended everyone was exhausted from yelling at the game to finish. And everyone agreed they couldn’t wait for the next time to play.

The beauty of the pool was it’s simplicity. Time and an equal shot at winning. Nothing more. Overtime meant even more time for players to stress while screaming at the TV. I could run a pool for the end of the first half and draw near the same excitement. If I had 30 people who wanted to play I’d create three pools.

Now that a new season of the NFL is kicking off (the pool works just fine for Alabama vs. LSU as well) go down to your local sports bar and tell the bartender to turn one TV to the Weather Channel, grab nine friends and begin to stress.

Or you can do this pool in your man cave and be hated by the neighbors every Sunday, Monday/Thursday night.

BTW….the Cleveland vs. Philadelphia game demands this pool to be watchable.

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