The Room Gets A Vote

For two years The Pecking Order has ranked this league with math: half all-play record, half rolling three-week scoring, no opinions involved. It has been right often enough to be annoying and wrong often enough to be worth arguing with. The arguing has been happening in the group chat, where it dies.

So now it happens on the record. The ballot opens with the column every Tuesday and closes Thursday at the week's first kickoff — not Wednesday night, deliberately. Setting a lineup is the one thing everybody in this league reliably does, and it mostly happens Wednesday through Sunday, so a Wednesday deadline was asking you to make a second trip. Now it's the same trip: there's a ballot strip on your lineup page, and you can vote from there without going anywhere.

You rank seven of sixteen. First pick is worth 7 points, seventh is worth 1, every ballot counts the same, and you may absolutely rank yourself — that is not a loophole anybody is closing. It is the entire source of the Homer Index, which measures how much higher you rated your own team than the room did, and which is going to make somebody very famous around here. Eight ballots are needed for a consensus to publish; below that the column runs on the numbers alone and everybody knows why.

Ballots stay sealed until the poll closes, then all of them publish. There is a voters page keeping the receipts: who voted, how often, and how well they actually read the league — every ballot is scored against how the season plays out, so being loudly wrong in Week 3 is a thing that follows you to Week 14. The Contrarian Index is there too, for the owner whose ballot agrees with nobody. Sometimes that owner is the only one who saw it coming.

The chat will not be nagging you about this. It gets one automated post a day now, total, and the poll has to share that budget with everything else — so the reminders come to your phone instead, and only if you asked for them, on the notifications page. Ballot opens, ballot closing, where the room put your team. Turn on the ones you want and ignore the rest.