Spreads and how a pick is graded
What −3.5 means, whether your team covered, and the push rule that surprises people.
What the number means
The number beside a team is its point spread: a minus number means that team is favoured and starts the game giving away that many points, and a plus number means it is the underdog and starts by receiving them.
Every game shows two spreads that mirror each other. If one team is -3.5 the other is +3.5. The favourite has to win by more than its number for a pick on it to count; the underdog can lose by less than its number and a pick on it still counts.
The spread exists to make a lopsided game worth picking. Without it, everyone would pick the stronger team every week and nobody's picks would differ.
The sign is the only favourite/underdog signal on the picks screen — there is no FAV or DOG badge, no colour difference, and no tooltip. A minus number is the favourite. That is the whole convention.
Did my pick cover?
Add your team's own spread to its final score. If that total is higher than the other team's score, your pick covered and you earn the point.
One rule covers both sides of every game, because each team carries its own spread. You never have to work out which team was favoured — just add the number you picked to the score of the team you picked.
This is why a pick can win while the team loses, and lose while the team wins. Beat the Spread scores the spread, not the scoreboard.
What happens on an exact push
When the spread lands exactly on the final margin, the underdog's pickers win the point and the favourite's pickers lose it. Nobody gets a refund and no pick is voided.
A push is when the two sides come out exactly level — the Chiefs are -3 and win by exactly 3, so 24 − 3 = 21 against the Bills' 21. Many pools treat that as a tie and give the point back to everyone. Sportpoolz does not.
On an exact push the underdog wins. A completed game with a spread always produces exactly one winning side, so if you picked the favourite and the spread landed on the nose, that pick is scored as a loss.
This is worth knowing before you pick, because it changes how a whole-number spread reads. A -3 favourite has to win by 4 or more, not by 3, for a pick on it to count.
Half-points, even lines and missing lines
A half-point (the .5) exists so the margin cannot land exactly on the number. When a line has no half-point, or no line was ever posted, the rules below take over.
Most spreads carry a half-point precisely to rule out a push: a margin cannot be 3.5, so a -3.5 favourite either wins by 4 (covered) or does not (did not). Spreads are always displayed to one decimal place with an explicit sign.
- A whole-number spread can land exactly on the margin — see the push rule above.
- A pick'em game (no favourite) shows a spread of 0.0 on both sides.
- If a game finishes with no spread ever attached to it, there is no line to beat, so it is graded straight up: whoever picked the winning team earns the point. A genuine tied game is the one case where nobody wins or loses.
A game can appear without a line if the schedule arrived before the odds feed covered it. That is a timing gap, not an error — the line usually appears before kickoff, and if it never does, the straight-up rule applies.
Where the lines come from
Spreads come from a commercial odds feed, refresh on a few-minute cycle, and can move between the moment you pick and kickoff.
Lines are not set by your pool's owner and cannot be edited by them. They are pulled from a betting-odds provider and updated on a repeating sync, so the number you see is the current market line rather than a fixed value set at the start of the week.
A line can move after you pick. Your pick is graded against the game's spread, not against the number that was showing when you tapped. If a favourite drifts from -3 to -4.5 during the week, your pick has to beat -4.5.
Your activity feed records the spread that was showing at the moment you made each pick, so you can always see what you were looking at even after the line has moved.
Which formats use spreads
Only Beat the Spread scores against the line. Pick'em, Confidence, Survivor and Playoff pools ignore it, and hide the number entirely.
If your picks screen shows a small grey number beside each team, you are in a Beat the Spread pool. If it does not, your pool scores straight up and you simply pick the team you think will win.
Other help topics
Still stuck?
Short questions are usually answered on the FAQ. If yours isn't, send us a message and we'll take a look.