After our post-season break, we've been working on our plan for the next 6-12 months and beyond, and we wanted to share some of those plans with you so that you can suggest improvements, or at least feel reassured that we haven't died. Yet.

Once the season ended we took some time to discuss the 'vision' for what Pickwatch can and should be both with the NFL and other sports. Last year was a quiet one for developmental purposes, due to a more informal development schedule behind the scenes with our tech team. As a result, the only major step forward was the launch of our mobile site and a few odds and ends, which is excellent news in the long-run, but not quite where we wanted to be by now.

This year, we've gone the other way and we've changed that side of the operation to ensure that headed into 2016, we should have some major upgrades for key features.

Our 4 main goals during the 2016 offseason are as follows:

###### Launching our College site (CFBPickwatch.com)

###### Launching our year-round 'Prediction Tracker' service

###### Changing our ATS method to allow your predictions to be tracked, moving lines etc

###### Upgrading your view of our stats, allowing you to customize views and add filters to manipulate the data and show what you think is most important.

Today I'm going to focus on the Prediction Tracker, primarily because it's hopefully going to go live in the next 2-3 weeks, but also because in my view, it's the biggest day-to-day update the site has seen yet. We think it'll become part of your daily, maybe even hourly routine all year round, and while I personally know what that means for my social life, I and the other Pickwatch team members are straining at the leash to get started doing this every day.

Q&A:

What is the Prediction Tracker?

Glad you didn't ask. The Prediction Tracker is our service that will compile every analyst opinion, rumor, prediction, mock draft and draft grade and store them for posterity. Once the associated event has either come to pass or not, we will tell you (on a sliding scale) whether the prediction was correct.

What's the point though?

Whoah there, cool your jets pal and let me explain! Some people...

We think there's a lot of loud and prominent people in the media today whose opinions are either under-researched or just poorly thought out. In some cases, it's also pretty clear that some pundits just throw out opinions as counterpoints or to be controversial.

We hate that. We know you guys hate it too and it's probably one of the reasons you come here, so that an independent team can verify and rank all of these different picks, opinions and predictions without any bias right? Well we're going to apply the same logic we apply to the expert picks to the Prediction Tracker.

How will it look?

This is currently in development, but it'll be pretty simple. Here's a rough mock-up:

As you can see, we'll have the brief of what's been said by who, and we'll of course tell you if it's right or not.

So will the Prediction Tracker only show predictions from the past?

Aha! I knew you were interested secretly...

No it won't. Another reason we think you'll like the prediction tracker is that we're going to update it regularly throughout the day. You can expect that as soon as we're aware of a prediction or opinion in the media, it'll show on our pages. We'll then evaluate once the event happens, so it'll be a rolling news feed of opinions throughout the day, and as you know, we'll be able to say whether some were right or wrong within hours - or even minutes.

What if I'm only interested in my own team?

Here you go then - just filter by your team and you can check the latest rumors throughout the day, or go back and see previous ones. You will also be able to filter by subject (eg: draft, free agency etc) and various other parameters. Essentially, you can show as much or as little as you want, relevant only to your team or to the whole NFL.

When will it go live?

Our aim at the moment is the first week of April. Assuming all goes well, we'd like to be fully functional by that point and able to add in our test data we've been acquiring to ensure we have a good idea of issues that may arise

Will this effect the normal Pickwatch service?

Absolutely not. In our view, the Prediction Tracker and Pickwatch are complimentary to each other - we're just hoping to add some more value to the site and particularly keep track of all those ad-hoc predictions that are made throughout the offseason.

These predictions are also an integral part of what we want to do across more sports, plus it means we can get straight on covering important events like Free Agency, the draft and training camp, where predictions are made almost constantly by the NFL media.

How far back will the Prediction Tracker go?

This is a good question. Wait, I just realized I have asked that question of myself, and just congratulated myself on it. Hmmm...

We're definitely intending to add the capability to enter historic data at this stage, no question. Adding that data will of course take a lot of time when coupled with the dozens of daily NFL articles that make some type of prognostication, but we're very happy to do so. Over time, we hope to back-fill the archive to the point where there's thousands of predictions and opinions all evaluated for each team.

Ok you win, it sounds pretty good. Can we submit predictions?

That's something we'd like to have if possible. We're looking at various ways you can contribute to both the submission of predictions that you've seen made (complete with source for us to ratify before being published) and the evaluation of predictions after events. At worst, we'll have a dedicated email address for you to send them in to. A more likely compromise is a web form where you can fill in some details and we can enter it into the database.

At the moment, we'll be doing both from our side, but we can see the advantages to allowing some public input into both. Equally, we have to avoid manipulation of the evaluation process by 'interested parties' shall we say...

I'm sold - anything else?

Yeah, a few things to note

• The database will be searchable, so if you have a favorite player, you can search for their name and it'll bring up anything related to them.

• There'll likely be a 5 point scale, with 100% being correct, 75% being largely correct and so forth. Sometimes that will be self explanatory, but we may also include a 'comment' on each prediction to explain evaluations where necessary. That'll depend on space...

• We'll look to make it as mobile-friendly as possible, but unlike the main picks page, we don't anticipate it being too hard to fit it onto your mobile anyway.

• Don't quote me on this, but if the tracker is a success, we'd like to remove some of the ads around the site (particularly around the bottom). All of this stuff costs money, so it's a fine balance and we're of the opinion that ads are still better than charging people.

So that's it. We think the Prediction tracker is a necessary evil in today's sports media. Whether it's 'hot-takes' or any other example of media 'experts' giving ridiculous, overblown, ill-conceived, needless prognostications that inevitably are completely incorrect, we want to track them for you and maybe, in doing so, add a little bit of accountability to some of the more egregious practitioners of this dark art.

Equally, we're not doing this to embarrass anyone outright. We're going to be as objective as possible and the idea is simply to provide a useful service to you guys, the fans, as well as a record of predictions made over time. There are also incidental benefits, such as the aforementioned 'team feeds' and live updates of NFL predictions around draft time, for example, that made this an easy decision to prioritize this offseason.

So that's part 1 of our offseason plan... part 2 will look at some of our other plans over the coming 6 months, and we may even let you in on some of our bigger ideas for the future of the site. If there's something you think could work as part of this, or an alteration you think could work, we'd love to hear from you. There's a comments section below, or you can get in touch via twitter or Facebook. If all else fails, we'll also accept good old emails too.

We'll let you know in the next few weeks how progress is coming along!