NFL GameDay PickEm, Case Study

With the 2011 season, the NFL Network wanted to run a season long campaign during which the fans compete against the analysts from the NFL GameDay TV show. Being huge fans of the show and the sport, we were very excited to be a part of the design and development end for this project.

We created a design, which allows the users to find all the information they need on one screen as well as make their picks. When a user lands on the application, they are able to view all the matches that are coming up for the week, which teams were predicted by the analysts to win, and then make their decision on which team they feel will win. The users can also see how the fans are voting, share their picks for the week on their Facebook profile and share their statistics so far for the season.

The leaderboard allows users to compete against their friends, against the analysts, or to see where they stand in the overall global scale of things. Users also get to see past results to check out how they did and see if they can learn from their mistakes.

The application is deployed on NFL.com as a Facebook Connect application and on Facebook as an independent canvas application with data synchronized across both.

This application is built to withstand traffic in the millions if not tens of millions and if the first few weeks are to be used as a benchmark, the overwhelming response only means that the multiple servers, load balancers and caches that have been put in place are going to have a busy season ahead of them.