NFL Confidence Picks Explained

Confidence picks (also called a confidence pool or confidence points) is one of the most popular NFL pick'em scoring formats, because it rewards players for correctly identifying their most confident calls, not just for picking the most winners.

How Confidence Scoring Works

Each week, a player picks a winner for every game, then ranks all of their picks from least to most confident. If there are 14 games in a week, the picks get point values 1 through 14, with no repeats - the pick worth 14 points is the player's most confident call, and the pick worth 1 point is their toughest guess. A correct pick earns the points assigned to it; an incorrect pick earns nothing, no matter how many points were riding on it.

A Worked Example

Say a player assigns their highest value, 14 points, to a game they're certain about, and their lowest value, 1 point, to a true coin-flip game. If the 14-point pick is correct, they bank 14 points toward that week's total. If the 1-point pick is wrong, they simply don't earn those points - it costs them nothing extra. The strategy comes from deciding which games truly deserve your highest values, since a wrong high-value pick is a bigger missed opportunity than a wrong low-value one.

Why Groups Like It

Confidence scoring adds a layer of strategy on top of simply picking winners: two players can both go 10-4 in a week and land in very different spots on the leaderboard, depending on which games they were most confident about. It tends to produce tighter, more competitive standings over a full season than straight-up picking alone.

Confidence Picks on REDZONEPicks.app

A commissioner turns on Confidence Points scoring once, for the whole pool, when setting it up. From there, every player's pick sheet includes a confidence value selector for each game, with the app enforcing that every value from 1 through the number of games gets used exactly once.

Other Scoring Formats

Confidence Points is one of several formats REDZONEPicks.app supports. See our full scoring formats guide for how it compares to straight-up, Key Picks, and Capped Point Values scoring.