Why there is a slate at all
This is the single biggest difference between a basketball pick’em pool and a football one, and it is not a limitation. A pool survives on participation: the week everybody stops filling in the card is the week the pool is over, and nobody fills in fifty games on a Monday morning in January.
So each week runs on a short list instead. Five games by default, chosen automatically and weighted toward the nationally televised ones — the games your players had already planned to watch. The commissioner can change the size, or swap an individual game out, right up until the week locks.
Five decisions people actually make
A short card has a side effect worth having: people think about it. Five games get real consideration, where fifty get a column of coin flips, and a pool decided by considered picks is a better argument in the group chat than one decided by who could be bothered.
The slate is the same for everyone, so the standings compare like with like.
Locked at tip-off, graded off the feed
Each pick locks when its game tips, which in a league that plays most nights means the card closes in stages rather than all at once. Scores arrive off the live feed, so nobody types a result into a spreadsheet. Picks grade themselves as games go final, standings move on their own, and the commissioner finds out who won at the same time as everyone else.