Strategy
NFL Week 3 Pick'em: 15 Games Left and Why It Isn't Week 4
This weekend is NFL Week 3. It is not Week 4. That sounds like a detail nobody needs until someone in your group fills out the wrong card, or an organizer names the pool after the wrong week and spends Sunday explaining it. Our own schedule data has the season sitting on Week 3, and Week 4 does not start until 1 October.
The other reason the number matters this weekend: for a lot of pools, the NFL is the only thing on the board. Liga MX plays its last round on Sunday and then goes quiet until 9 October. The Premier League has not played since 20 September and does not return until 10 October. LaLiga has no fixtures this weekend either. If your group runs a mixed pool, Week 3 is carrying it alone for the next eleven days.
The complete Week 3 card
Times are Eastern, taken from our own schedule data.
Thursday, September 24 (already played)
| Time (ET) | Result |
|---|---|
| 8:15 PM | Atlanta Falcons 35, Green Bay Packers 14 |
Sunday, September 27
| Time (ET) | Matchup |
|---|---|
| 1:00 PM | Los Angeles Chargers at Buffalo Bills |
| 1:00 PM | Carolina Panthers at Cleveland Browns |
| 1:00 PM | New York Jets at Detroit Lions |
| 1:00 PM | Houston Texans at Indianapolis Colts |
| 1:00 PM | Kansas City Chiefs at Miami Dolphins |
| 1:00 PM | Tennessee Titans at New York Giants |
| 1:00 PM | Cincinnati Bengals at Pittsburgh Steelers |
| 1:00 PM | Seattle Seahawks at Washington Commanders |
| 1:00 PM | New England Patriots at Jacksonville Jaguars |
| 4:05 PM | Arizona Cardinals at San Francisco 49ers |
| 4:05 PM | Minnesota Vikings at Tampa Bay Buccaneers |
| 4:25 PM | Baltimore Ravens at Dallas Cowboys |
| 4:25 PM | Las Vegas Raiders at New Orleans Saints |
| 8:20 PM | Los Angeles Rams at Denver Broncos |
Monday, September 28
| Time (ET) | Matchup |
|---|---|
| 8:15 PM | Philadelphia Eagles at Chicago Bears |
Sixteen games in the week, fifteen still to pick after Thursday night.
The shape of the week, and what it does to a pool
Week 3 is front-loaded in a way Week 2 was not. Nine of the sixteen games kick off in the same hour, at 1:00 PM Sunday. Four more land in the 4:05 and 4:25 window, and then the week trickles out through Sunday night and Monday.
Three practical consequences:
- Most of your pool is decided before 4:00 PM Sunday. Nine games resolving together is the single biggest swing of the week. Whatever your scoring is, it pays out in one block.
- The Monday game is a long tail with real weight. Eagles at Bears is the last card in the week, and in a tight table it is the one that flips the standings after everyone has stopped watching the leaderboard.
- A single lock before Thursday is a very different pool than per-game locks. With nine simultaneous kickoffs, per-game locking barely helps on Sunday morning and matters a lot for the Sunday night and Monday games.
We went through the trade-offs of each deadline style in when should pick’em pool picks lock. The short version: pick one, publish it, and stop renegotiating it mid-week.
Two rules worth settling before Sunday
1. Decide what a Monday-night comeback is worth. If your scoring is one point per correct pick, the Monday game counts the same as any 1:00 PM game and nothing special happens. If you use margin or exact-score scoring, the last game of the week is disproportionately powerful, because it is the only one people can still watch knowing exactly what they need. Neither is wrong. Deciding it on Monday afternoon is.
2. Say what happens to a game that moves. Schedule changes are less common in the NFL than in a football league mid-international-window, but they happen, and a pool with no written rule for a moved kickoff is a pool with an argument waiting in it. Write it down before anyone picks: scored later, voided, or the round stays open.
If you are setting the pool up from scratch, the full walkthrough is in how to run an NFL pick’em pool with friends, and last week’s card and numbers are in the Week 2 guide.
Why the soccer half of your pool is empty right now
This is worth understanding rather than guessing at. The September and October international windows were merged into one 16-day window, 21 September to 6 October, with national teams playing four matches instead of the usual two. That is why the Premier League stopped after Matchweek 5 and comes back with Matchweek 6 on 10 October, and why LaLiga has nothing this weekend.
Liga MX did not stop. It played its round inside the window and then takes the gap on the other side: no Liga MX match between 28 September and 8 October, with Round 11 running 9 to 11 October.
We covered what call-ups do to a pool that keeps playing through a window in international break: what call-ups do to your pick’em pool. This piece is the other half of it: what a pool does when the league simply is not there. The answer, for the next eleven days, is the NFL.
Get the pool running before Sunday
Fifteen games, nine of them at once, and a Monday night that can still turn the table. That is a good week to have the schedule, the scoring and the live standings handled for you instead of rebuilt in a group chat.
Download Quini, create your NFL pool, invite the group, and set the lock rule before Sunday’s 1:00 PM block. Free to play, no money involved.