The 2026 CFBD Model Pick'em is live
The 2026 edition of the CFBD Model Pick'em is now live.
The contest gives college football modelers a practical weekly benchmark: submit projected margins, compare your results against the field, and track how your approach performs throughout the season.
Picks can be submitted through the site, CSV upload, or API. After results post, the site includes the full leaderboard, head-to-head comparisons, and crowd analytics.
The contest is free: https://predictions.collegefootballdata.com/
If you have the data but are still working through how to train and evaluate a prediction model, the 2026 Model Training Pack is designed for that next step. It covers feature engineering, training, validation, calibration, prediction exports, interpretability, and evaluation. You can get the pack here: https://collegefootballdata.gumroad.com/l/model-training-pack
I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone builds and how the models hold up once the season starts!
-Bill
Comments (2)
Why is the only option for joining the pickem through authorizing the app for X access or reddit access?
The Pick'em started as part of the r/CFBAnalysis subreddit and then expanded to Twitter due to the extensive CFB analytics community on that platform. That is why these are the two available identity providers.