Turning a Weekly NFL Picks Pool Into an Automated System

The manual version worked — until it didn’t

A weekly picks pool sounds simple: send out the games, collect everyone’s selections, and total the results. The trouble is that the same little tasks return every single week. Who has submitted? Who still needs a reminder? Which games have already started? What happens when someone changes a pick?

None of those jobs is difficult by itself. Together, they create a lot of repetitive administration.

Use the spreadsheet as the source of truth

I built the workflow around Google Sheets so the schedule, players, picks, and results all live in one structured place. Google Forms provides a simple submission experience, and Apps Script handles the repetitive logic around it.

That design matters because automation becomes much easier when the data has one clear home.

Automate the moments that repeat

The useful automations were not flashy. They were the tasks I knew I would otherwise perform manually: creating the weekly form, tracking submissions, sending reminders, ignoring games that had already started, summarizing picks, and preparing the next week.

The project became a system

Once the core workflow was reliable, the fun part was adding better summaries: unanimous picks, divided games, weekly standings, cumulative results, and clearer notifications.

The bigger lesson was that small personal projects are a great place to learn automation because the feedback loop is immediate. If the workflow saves time on Sunday night, the improvement is obvious.