The Best Tiebreaker Rules for Football Pools

Quick answer: The most reliable football pool tiebreaker is a total-points prediction on the last game of the week — usually Monday night — with the win going to whoever is closest to the actual combined score. Closest-without-going-over is the fairest variant, and margin of victory is a good backup when you need a second layer. Set the rule before the season starts so nobody argues about it in Week 8.

Ties are not an edge case in a football pool. In a big week where the favorites all cover, half your players can finish with the same record. Without a tiebreaker written down in advance, you are left splitting a weekly prize four ways or, worse, making a judgment call that one of the four people involved will resent. A clear tiebreaker rule turns a headache into a two-second lookup.

There are only a handful of tiebreakers worth using, and they mostly come down to two choices: what number are players predicting, and how do you measure who got closest. Below is each option, when it works, and how to combine them into a rule your group will accept.

Total points scored on a chosen game

This is the classic. Every player enters a guess for the combined final score of one designated game — most commonly the Monday night game, because it is the last one to finish and keeps the week alive. If two players tie on record, the one whose guess is closest to the real total wins.

Total points works because it is easy to understand, nearly impossible to game, and produces a clear winner almost every time. Two people rarely guess the exact same total, and even if they do, real scores land on odd numbers often enough that exact ties on the tiebreaker itself are rare. Use the final game of the week so the prediction stays meaningful right up to the last whistle.

Closest-to vs. closest-without-going-over

Once you have players guessing a number, you need to decide how “closest” is measured. There are two accepted methods.

Closest-to is pure distance. If the real total is 47 and one player guessed 45 while another guessed 50, the 45 wins because it is only two off instead of three. Overshooting is allowed. This is the simplest to explain and the one most people expect.

Closest-without-going-over borrows from game-show logic: if you guess higher than the actual total, you are out of the running, and the win goes to the closest guess that stayed at or under the real number. In the example above, the player who guessed 50 would be eliminated for going over, handing it to the 45. This rewards players who play it a little safe and removes the small unfairness of someone lucking into a win by wildly overguessing. It is the fairer of the two, and it is a good default if your group is competitive about weekly money.

Whichever you choose, state it explicitly. “Closest” alone is ambiguous, and the difference decides real winners.

Margin of victory

Instead of the combined score, players predict how many points one team wins the designated game by. If the pick is the home team and they win by 6, whoever guessed closest to 6 takes it. Margin of victory tends to cluster in a tighter range than total points, which means more exact ties, so it works best as a second tiebreaker rather than your first. If two players somehow tie on both record and total points, margin of victory is a clean way to break the deadlock.

Building a layered rule

For most groups, one tiebreaker is enough. If you want to be thorough, stack them in order and apply each only when the one above it fails to separate players:

Head-to-head record for the week (the actual picks).
Total points on the final game, closest-without-going-over.
Margin of victory on that same game.
Earliest submitted pick sheet, or a coin flip, as a last resort.

Publishing the full ladder up front means every possible tie already has an answer. Nobody gets to lobby you for a rule change once they know they are on the losing end of it.

Season-long ties are different

Everything above is built for weekly ties. For the year-to-date standings that decide your season champion, a single Monday-night guess is too small to lean on. Better options are total correct picks across the season, then best single-week record, then head-to-head in the weeks both players entered. Decide this early too, because a season tie usually involves the biggest payout of the year and the most scrutiny.

Let the software handle it

The reason tiebreakers cause friction is not the rule itself — it is doing the math by hand at 11:40 on a Monday night while everyone waits to hear who won. Running your pool online removes that entirely. With Football Pool hosting, you set the tiebreaker as total points scored or margin of victory, pick closest-to or closest-without-going-over, and the standings resolve ties automatically as the final score comes in. Players enter their tiebreaker number right on the pick sheet, so there is nothing to collect or transcribe.

That also frees you, the commissioner, to stop being a referee. If you want more on running a fair, low-drama pool, the commissioner tips guide covers scoring, disputes and deadlines, and the rules explained guide walks through how tiebreakers fit into pick’em, confidence and survivor formats. You can host any of them at Football Pool.