PickEms
A two-person NFL league scored against the spread. Each week a coin flip
decides who drafts first; the two of you draft 5 sides from that week's slate,
and whoever finishes the season with the most ATS wins takes it.
The rules it enforces
- Coin flip each week. The winner gets picks 1, 3, 5; the loser gets
2, 4. The 3-vs-2 split is the point — winning the flip is the weekly edge.
- Draft a side, not a winner. You take
SEA -3.5, not "Seattle."
- One pick per game. Once either side of a matchup is drafted, the whole
game is gone — if you take
SEA -3.5, NE +3.5 isn't available to your
opponent either.
- A losing pick hands the win to the other player. If your pick fails to
cover, your opponent is credited the win for it, as if they'd implicitly held
the other side without drafting it. A push moves nothing — no one gains. This
makes a fully graded week zero-sum: with 5 picks and P pushes, the total wins
between you always add up to
5 - P.
- Weekly winner = most ATS wins. Season champion = most total ATS wins.
Stack
Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript + Tailwind, Prisma + Postgres (Neon), hosted
on Vercel. Slate, spreads, and final scores come from ESPN's public scoreboard
endpoint — no API key.
Getting started
You need a free Neon Postgres database — there's no local
SQLite file any more, so local development talks to the same database as
production.
npm install
cp .env.example .env # paste your Neon URLs + pick a league password
npx prisma migrate dev
npm run db:seed # creates the two players
npm run dev
Open http://localhost:3000. Player names are set in
prisma/seed.ts — edit them before seeding.
DATABASE_URL must be Neon's pooled string (the host contains -pooler)
and DIRECT_URL the unpooled one. Serverless functions open a connection per
invocation, so queries go through the pooler, while prisma migrate needs a
direct connection.
Deploying
- Push to GitHub (already wired up).
- Import the repo at vercel.com — the Hobby plan is free
for personal projects.
- Add four environment variables in Vercel:
DATABASE_URL, DIRECT_URL,
ADMIN_PASSWORD, and CRON_SECRET (generate with openssl rand -hex 32).
- Add that same
CRON_SECRET value as a GitHub Actions repository secret
(Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → New repository secret) so the
automated spread sync can authenticate — see How spreads freeze below.
- Run
npx prisma migrate deploy and npm run db:seed once against Neon.
package.json runs prisma generate on postinstall because Vercel caches
node_modules — without it the deployed Prisma Client can silently go stale
against a changed schema.
Weekly flow
- Admin → Sync slate for the season and week. This pulls the full slate and
freezes each game's spread.
- Admin → coin flip. Record who won it, or let the app flip. Write-once per
week, so it can't be re-rolled.
- Home page → draft. Enter the 5 picks in order; the app tracks whose slot
is next and greys out sides that are gone.
- Admin → Sync scores & grade once games finish. Grades every pick W/L/PUSH
and decides the week.
How spreads freeze
ESPN drops the odds once a game goes final — a line that isn't captured
before kickoff is gone for good. So each game's spread stays live — re-syncing
keeps it current with the market — right up until that game's own kickoff,
then it locks permanently. Both players are always graded against that one
frozen line, which guarantees exactly one side covers (or it's a push); no
after-the-fact line movement can change that.
If ESPN has no line for a game, that game isn't draftable until you set one by
hand under Games missing a spread in Admin.
Automatic syncing
Nothing needs to stay open for this — the site and database are fully hosted
and run on their own 24/7. Re-syncing does need to be triggered, though,
which .github/workflows/sync-spreads.yml
does automatically:
- every 3 hours, as a steady background refresh
- every 5 minutes, checking whether any game is within 20 minutes of kickoff —
a cheap no-op the rest of the time, so each game still gets a fresh line
shortly before it locks
Both call /api/cron/sync-spreads, authenticated with CRON_SECRET. This runs
on GitHub Actions rather than Vercel's own Cron Jobs because Vercel's Hobby
plan caps cron jobs at once per day — nowhere near frequent enough here.
You can still click Sync slate in Admin any time; it does the same thing
manually, and is the only way to load a week that hasn't been synced yet (the
automation only refreshes weeks that already exist).
ATS grading
With homeSpread stored as the home team's line (negative = home favored):
adjusted = homeScore + homeSpread - awayScore
adjusted > 0 → home side covers
adjusted < 0 → away side covers
adjusted = 0 → push
Notes
ADMIN_PASSWORD is a single shared league password. It gates entering picks
and every admin action; viewing the week and the standings is open to anyone
with the link. It keeps strangers out, but it does not stop the two of you
from entering each other's picks — there are no per-player logins.- Undo removes only the most recent pick; deleting a middle pick would leak
information about the picks made after it.
- Neon's free tier scales the database to zero after ~5 minutes idle, so the
first page load after a quiet spell takes about a second.
