COVID-19 and the NCAA Tournament

The NCAA is taking precautions in order to conduct a successful tournament, however, it's important to plan for the possibility that a team might not be able to play due to an outbreak. If it is determined that a team can not play before the tournament starts, their conference may select a replacement team. If this happens, we will automatically replace any picks for the disqualified team with the replacement team. If the team is not replaced, members can still change their picks up until your pool's pick deadline.

Once the tournament starts, any teams who can't play will forfeit, and their opponent will advance. In this scenario, we will treat the game as a win for the opponent by default, the same way we would treat any other game.

Due to the many pool formats and settings we offer, and different ways pool admins want to run their pool, there is no good one-size fits all solution to addressing these forfeits. For most pools (especially bracket pools), it will make sense to just leave picks as-is and chalk it up to the luck of the draw, however, for other formats if admins would like to replace picks for forfeited games, they can do so at any time under the Member Pick Maintenance section (if you have an extremely large pool and need assistance with a pool-wide replacement, let us know). If you intend to do this, we strongly recommend you formulate a plan ahead of time, outlining the scenarios where you will be replacing teams and who you will replace them with, and then make sure to communicate that plan to your members. Just keep in mind that if you are running a bracket pool, your options are limited because you can't insert a different team in the middle of a bracket.

For the Survivor pool format, we have added the option for members to enter a "backup pick" that you can manually use as a replacement in whatever scenario you'd like. Pool Admins can enable this under their pool settings. To be clear, we will NOT apply this backup pick automatically. It is simply there for the Pool Admin to apply manually when/how they choose.