The NFL season is approaching and I have created a free template in Excel that will make it easy to keep track of your favorite teams. You can also use it to make predictions and compete against your friends and colleagues. Here’s a look at how the template works.
Updating scores, the schedule, and your time zone
On the Master.Schedule tab, you’ll see a list of games for the NFL season. As the games are played, this is where you can update the scores. You can also update the schedule. Currently the Week 18 schedule is still to be determined, and while the matchups are known, the dates and times of those games won’t be set until towards the end of the season, after Week 17.
There is a time field showing when all the games are scheduled, which by default is set to ET. However, if you’re in a different time zone you can select your preferred time zone from the drop-down option on the left. You can change to PT, MT, or CT.
If your time zone isn’t listed here, then you can delete the selection, and change the time zone in the GMT offset section below:
This value will only apply if the preferred time zone is cleared out. After updating your time zone settings, you’ll see that in the Your Local Time field, the time of the games will be updated to reflect your local time zone.
You can also specify a watchlist of teams you’re interested in following. You can select multiple teams, and upon doing so, the schedule will update to highlight the games they are involved in:
Viewing a complete schedule for a full team
If you just want to track the games involving a specific team, you can do that on the Team.Schedule tab. From the drop-down on the left-hand side, you can select the team you’re interested in, and their schedule will update, including their bye week.
This page is formatted to make it easy to print out on a single sheet of paper, in landscape mode.
Viewing the full week schedule
If you prefer to see the list of games for the full week, you can utilize the Weekly.Schedule tab to do that. Similar to the team tab, here you’ll update the week with the Week number. You can also use the watchlist to track teams you are interested in, just as on the Master.Schedule tab.
Viewing the entire NFL season on a grid format
On the Schedule.Grid tab, you have a list of the entire games by team, for the entire season. Here, you can see the opponents they are playing, as well as their bye weeks.
There are also different settings you can apply, such as a watchlist to show any key matchups you are interested in. You can highlight the schedule for an entire team, highlight Monday night games, Thursday night games, international games, and Christmas Day games. Below, I’ve flagged games involving Buffalo, New England, and Miami. I’ve also highlighted the full schedule for Green Bay, and have checked off the option for any Monday night games.
This results in various cells being highlighted on the grid:
The red highlighted cells are for any games involving the teams on the watchlist. These cells will only highlight if two of the teams from the watchlist are playing. In this example, any games involving a combination of Buffalo, New England, and Miami will be highlighted. It won’t simply highlight any games involving them.
The dark blue highlighted cells are for Monday night games. And the cells are green when an entire team is selected. Yellow highlighting will apply for Thursday night games, while cells will highlight in purple if you want to see international games. Christmas Day games will highlight in green with a red font color.
Standings will update as you enter results
As you update the scores on the Master.Schedule tab, the Standings tab will also update, showing you the ranking of each division.
If at the end of the season, the standings are very tight and tiebreakers need to be applied, you may need to use the Override tab to manually put the correct standings. This is only if the positioning is incorrect on the Standings tab. While some tiebreakers are factored in, it won’t account for every possible scenario.
By entering values 1 through 4 on the Ranking Override column, you will assign specifically where those teams should rank. They are grouped by division. As the column name suggests, it will override the rankings here. To ensure no issues, if you use this column, enter all the rankings for any division where the standings are not correct.
Making predictions on the NFL template
On the Weekly.Predictions tab, you’ll see a list of the week’s games, similar to the Weekly.Schedule tab. But in addition to the schedule, you’ll also have an area to determine scoring rules for your predictions. You can specify the number of points awarded for a correct result, correct # of total points, if the exact score is correct, if the person beat the spread, if they got the over/under correct, and if there was a push on either the spread or the over/under.
If you are making predictions based on the spread and the over/under, you will need to manually update those columns .
On the other side of the sheet, there is an area for players to make their predictions for each game.
You can change the names from Player 1, Player 2, etc. to the actual names of the people making the predictions. The sheet supports up to 25 players. If you don’t need that many, simply delete the values in those cells for the names.
The points will total once both predictions are made and there are actuals that have been entered on the Master.Schedule tab (those values will populate on the Weekly.Prediction tab).
Lastly, on the Leaderboard tab, you can copy the results for the current week into the actuals section. The current week’s scores will populate below the row highlighted in yellow, which indicates that there are formulas below:
Copy these values above to the corresponding week, in the Actuals section:
As data is entered and updated, the cumulative results and chart at the top will update. However, to update the chart, you will need to refresh the data. This can be done by going into the Data tab and clicking Refresh Data.
Try out the NFL prediction and schedule template today!
The template is ready to download here:
NFL Schedule and Prediction Template in Excel
If you have any feedback or suggestions on the template, I’m always happy to hear them as I’m always lookin for ways to make the template as best as it can be!
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