During a week with a full slate of 16 games, the total amount of points you could earn is 136. During a week with 13 games, the best you can do is 91 points. This throws the whole season out of whack because you inevitably used your dropped points in those mid-season weeks, often despite picking fairly well. You often feel like, "What's the point?" when picking for a 13-game week.
But if you kept the max ranking at 16 every single week, things would be more fair. For instance, in a 13-game week, start with 16, step down accordingly, and have the lowest-ranked game be a 4 (dropping the 3, 2 and 1 rankings completely). If you did this, a 13-game week would have a maximum of 130 points, and performance across the season would be more consistent and less dependent on how many byes there are in a given week. This is a common sense alteration you definitely should make.

As the NFL has adjusted their schedule to always have Thursday games, the point spread will be a topic of discussion in situations as we saw on Thanksgiving. Some leagues allow players to choose up to 5 mins before each game, and other leagues dictate all picks must be done by the start of the first game of the week. If Yahoo "draws a line in the sand" for the point spread on Wednesday, they build in a 24hour leadup to the first game to fix any server issues that are currently seeing.

Alternatively, you could create a tool in the Commission Tools to have leagues CHOOSE when to set Final Spreads. For Leagues that choose "Thursday" for their spreads, a stipulation would read that for any Yahoo Server issues causing problems to the spreads, then Yahoo will remove all spreads from those games, and the results will be decided on "straight up." Not ideal, but at least this is a stated plan on how this type of situation will be handled if it rises again.

One of my members attempted to enter his picks around 7:20 CST, about 20 min before the deadline. However your site did not save his picks, and he ended up sending them to me (still before the game started). Now I have no ability to add his picks, even for the rest of the weekend.

In past seasons, the commissioner could modify the deadline. If that were still in effect, at least I could change that and add his picks so he wouldn't be locked out of the whole week. Why did that setting change?

In general, I think the commissioner should have a lot more power for private groups.

Under the current settings, a pick'em league with confidence factors can have total weekly points raging from 136 to 91 points depending on the number of games played. When playing the option to drop the low week, the current scoring system punishes players who perform well in those 'low total' weeks since the starting point is 45 points lower than most weeks (1/3 the total points!). This issue can be resolved 1 of 2 ways:

1) Every week is worth the same number of total points. If there are 16 games, 1-16 factors are used for a total of 136 points. If there are 13 games the lowest confidence factor would be 7, and there would be 4 games to apply that factor to (a total of 28 points). Factors 8-16 would be used normally to get to a total of 136 points.

2) Instead of dropping the high value factors when there are not 16 games, drop the low value factors. This would limit the variation from week to week. Instead of ranging from 136 to 91 totals would range from 136 to 130.

This is listed on here 100 times, let's make it 101 to see if yahoo gets our point. Fix the confidence points taken away for missed picks from what is virtually a freebie, taking away the 1 point pick, to taking away the highest confidence available. If there are 16 games and you miss Thursday, you lose your ability to put 16 on a game. That simple, I have played in hundreds of these and never seen a system that doesn't make players accountable for their team. Until now, this is a competition that they signed up for, it's not only yahoo or the rules responsibility to make the game fair but precisely to make sure it's not unfair. This system is broken and is truly unfair to the players getting their picks in. By doing it the way you do you promote people to not pick the Thursday game, they have nothing to lose. And if they are unsure you give them an out to make it their 1 point game. The worst part is the loophole it gives for players to literally cheat, yes your rules not only create an unfair environment for the players that are making their picks, you actually have rules that allow cheating and a way to circumvent the system legally. Players that believe a push is possible simply don't pick the game on purpose, forcing the lowest possible loss. This is simple and just plain common sense guys, fix this ASAP and this year. Amend the rules, nobody has a good argument for not doing it, unless they use the loophole. Sometimes you just have to make right immediately because it's just the right thing to do. This rule makes no sense. You have over 100 posts in 1 week and thousands over the last 5 years, you have the support and obviously something isn't right when 3 out of 4 posts are in regards to this problem.

Our group has the deadline set to 5 minutes before each game with confidence points. When players don't get their picks in prior to the Thursday deadline, they still have the option to assign all points for the week so obviously the 1 point pick is going to go on the game that they missed. That doesn't seem fair as the people that actually get their picks in on time usually assign more than the 1 point pick. There have been several upsets on Thursday this year already and the people that got their picks in on time were down way more points that the people that didn't bother to get their picks in on time.

For example...last night's Raiders game...most people picked KC with 9 or more confidence points so they are down those points. There were a handful of people that didn't get their picks in, so now they are only down 1 point.

I think that if you miss the deadline, you should lose the ability to assign highest confidence points. With that theory, then the people that didn't get their picks in on time would each be down 15 points so far this week and not just 1 point.

Just my .02, but it would be great if Yahoo! would entertain the change to make it fair.