Well hello there ladies and gents, it's about that time again...

It's been a long while since we last checked in and now that the football season is around the corner, we're going to break down some of the changes you'll be able to see on Pickwatch for the upcoming season.

We've been able to add some long-standing things we've wanted to bring you for a few years, while also fixing some minor behind-the-scenes issues that should make it possible for us to bring you more information quicker and in more detail than ever before. If you have been conditioned to love all of your NFL articles in list format, then hold on to your hats, because this is going to make your day.

College Picks

Oh... what? NCAA? CFB? There's really no right universal way of describing college football in acronym form, so instead, if you ever need to go directly to our college pages, just go to nflpickwatch.com/college and it'll take you directly there.

We wanted to add college picks a few years ago, but it was contingent on being able to do ATS picks 'right' (more on that below). As you probably can guess, many college games are effectively blowouts waiting to happen, so just tracking straight up would have been a disservice to you guys.

First up, yes, we do have straight up picks. There are roughly 12-16 games in your average CFB week that fall into the category of 'interesting' for straight up pick'em purposes, and they show on the main page. These are the games that most experts will pick, so that kind of dictates who will appear there week by week. You do have the option to view more picks by going to the 'conference' button and selecting from the drop down. This will (kind of obviously) narrow it down to just teams in the conference you choose, but with the caveat that we wouldn't expect 'most' experts to pick some of the more obscure college games each week, even in Division I games.

We also have ATS picks (yay) which are arguably way more important. As always, these are presented as text only. Some people have asked why, but the simple answer is that ATS is linked to gambling, therefore using images and logos associated with those teams is something we don't want to do in conjunction with gambling. If/when the NFL/NCAA change their approach to gambling (ie: when they can make some money off it), we'll change how we cover it.

Also in our college site are college power rankings. Each week we'll compile all of the available college power rankings and provide you with the top teams. It's currently set to be 25, but depending on how many teams appear below that threshold, we may change it.

Finally, you can also make your own college picks and see them tracked along with all of your fellow users. We had wanted to provide NFL and college ATS picks for users, but we're pushed for time on some other things and they're not a priority with 2 weeks to go, so if they end up in, that'd be sweet. If not, you know it'll be priority 1 for next year.

Anyway, we're quite happy with the college pages. It's the first time we've covered anything but the NFL, and it opens up our avenues to cover other sports from next year onwards.

Against the Spread

One of my favorite things on the site has always been compiling ATS picks. I've got boatloads of time for the people who put their opinions out there for free in a sector that is designed specifically to make monkeys of us all. Consider that to make a profit on ATS picks each year, you need to win over 52.4% of your NFL bets across a season.... sounds like nothing right? Well the best of the best in picking every game last season (Mario Mergola and Jason La Canfora) were on 54.9% by Super Bowl week, and only 10 of our tracked experts won enough to theoretically make a profit.

One of the flaws with our old system was really fundamental - the changing of spreads over the course of a week and the different spreads used by experts depending on which network they were affiliated with. It was very very rare, but there were occasions when one ATS expert would pick a team at -8.5 and another at -7.5, a difference great enough to have one expert win and another lose. In the past, we did not show the individual expert's spread, but that has changed and we can now show it, track it, and evaluate every result on an individual basis. That means that if the above team won by 8 points, one expert would win, the other would lose, and our results would show accordingly.

We can also change the spreads over the course of a week, so if a team's QB gets injured and their odds plummet, you'll see it on Pickwatch too.

The Prediction Tracker

Ok this one is something I'm not only proud of, but I think in the long run will provide a lot of interest for people who - like me - enjoy knowing whether people are truly good at prognostication, or just talking BS on a constant basis.

The Prediction Tracker does exactly what it says. It Predicts tracking.

Wait... no... hang on... it... that can't be right...

Essentially, every day we'll be collating as many predictions from around the NFL media as possible and evaluating them on a date we set. You can look through and narrow down the predictions based on a whole host of different filters, so for example if you're only interested in rumors surrounding your own team over the last few weeks, then you can select those options accordingly and filter out the stuff you aren't interested in.

Over time, we will collate thousands upon thousands of entries, and because we also track who is most accurate, you can see if someone is worth paying attention to on certain subjects.

I known I get excited about really geeky things on here, but the PT is a personal project that I think can be a valuable resource for the media and fans, rewarding the best and... ahem... 'encouraging the others to do better'. It's also a nice little way of getting daily and weekly updates on things you might have missed on your team.

Fantasy Football Rankings

We love fantasy football just as much as you do, but we're not good at it. You don't want my rankings, trust me. I've been in one dynasty league for 10 years and never made the playoffs (despite once cumulatively outscoring everyone in the entire 16 team league). Seriously. I have the worst luck, so putting my picks up would be an insult to you, your family, your pets, and the laws of random chance, all of which are more valid sources of fantasy football information.

But Pickwatch isn't about what we think, or you think, it's about what the experts think. More to the point, it's about how good they are at it, so we did something very simple.

Every week, we'll enter as many fantasy football rankings as possible into our database, which you can view in one easy place. It's a nice way of being able to see things all in one place rather than having to view 10-15 different places and 20+ experts, plus, you can see exactly which player is best on average and who ranks him above or below the 'consensus'. You can sort by the individual expert too, so you can see their full position rankings every week.

More importantly, we have a scoring system that gives more points the closer an expert is in a standard scoring format (the most prevalent advice is for standard leagues, we'll add DF, PPR and IDP in future of course) to the 'actual' ranking of players. If someone ranks a player number 5 and they're 5th best in fantasy score, then they'll get 10 points (TEN!), but the further either way they go from that ranking, the less points they'll score. It doesn't matter if someone out-performs or under-performs the projection, it matters that you have an idea of how close it was either way.

We have a rankings table that updates each week and allows you to see which expert's rankings are best for each position - so if someone is great at ranking QB's but terrible at D/ST projections, you can see as much.

It's a lot of work and as with everything we do, we'll refine it based on your feedback as we go along.

Power Rankings

We've actually done this for a few years now, but power rankings now have their own 'proper' table with a similar ethos to the fantasy rankings, only because there's no set way of measuring which teams are best, we leave out the accuracy part - Power Rankings are what they are: Fundamentally flawed opinions that should be taken with a grain of salt.

You can however, see how well your team performs on average, while also checking which networks over or under value your team compared to the average.

Little changes

There's tons of little things that have been done both in the back end and front end of the site. As you can see, we have a slightly new look, which hopefully performs a little better across multiple devices to a certain degree. We hate the ads as much as you, but the reality is that this site has progressed beyond the point of voluntary work. On average, we'll enter around 11,500 picks across our site every week, covering NFL straight up, ATS and fantasy picks, College straight up and ATS picks, NFL and college power rankings, as well as ad-hoc predictions via the Prediction Tracker. I'm sure you appreciate that while it's never a chore, it's a huge amount of work and the adverts are a necessary evil. We never want to charge for data, so this is the best way for us and you.

The reality of Pickwatch and the nature of the data means that mobile friendly is a pretty subjective matter, but if you are regularly visiting on a mobile and you just want NFL picks, our mobile site is sometimes a better option. We will default to the desktop version, but just go to the menu and select 'mobile' to go to m.nflpickwatch.com, where it all looks a little better, but lacks a lot of the depth we have on the main page. We always recommend that you try to use a tablet or above sized device to get the full picture, but our mobile site does give you the main picks...

Another little fundamental change is that we now count 'no pick' as 'no pick'. In the past, experts were given a L for this, which has divided opinion between 'if they can't be bothered then they deserve it' and my own opinion of 'we want to be accurate and no pick = no pick'.

Think of it like this: If someone only picked half of the games in the NFL each year, but they got them all 100% right, should they be given a rating of 50% or 100%? For me, the answer is obvious: Knowing the accurate win % is more important than 'punishing' someone for not picking certain games, even if they do so regularly.

Articles

We're going to have nice round-ups and previews every week, breaking down the straight up, ATS, fantasy and power rankings for you, while also previewing games around the league. You can see these articles at nflpickwatch.com/news and of course, we'll stick a link on the main page for you whenever something new is posted. In tour previews, we'll give you a

So that's about as good a list as I can think of right now. As you can see, we've progressed so far from the days of just straight up NFL picks and a kaleidoscope of data every week, but the ethos is always the same: We show you the picks, we tell you who is best. If you like it, please tell us or share it on social media (that means an awful lot), and if there's something you want us to do, or think we can do better, then by all means fire away.

You can comment on articles, email us, tweet us or send us a message on facebook and we will get back to you as soon as possible. All suggestions are welcome and all feedback - even the bad stuff - just helps us adapt what we do and get better at providing what has become a habitual 'must-see' for millions of NFL fans over the last 5 years.

All the best for 2016

Shaun