Method and sources
What this site publishes, where it comes from, and what it got wrong.
Sources
| Data | Source | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Scores, schedules, team news | ESPN public site API | Live |
| Contest consensus | Covers.com contest consensus, leader picks and public split, rebuilt daily | Live |
| Matchup statistics on archived sport pages | None: generated | Withdrawn |
The July 2026 withdrawal
An audit found that the against-the-spread records, points-per-game figures, home records, defensive rankings, line-movement notes and sharp-action claims on the automatically generated sport pages were not sourced from any data provider. They were produced by a random number generator. Because the underlying numbers never existed, those pages could not be corrected, only emptied. The generator was deleted. The URLs were kept live rather than removed so that the record of what was published is not quietly erased.
How the consensus board counts
The scraper itself queries real picks and fails loudly rather than inventing data when a feed is unreachable. What was wrong was the presentation: a public-money percentage was bucketed into an integer and summed into the same counter as real handicapper picks, so a board reading “8x” could have meant “public money was above 75 percent” rather than “eight handicappers picked this”. Publishing stopped in July 2026 until that was fixed. Since 29 September 2026 the badge counts only contest leaders who actually picked the side, and the Covers public split is printed next to it as its own figure, a percentage of all entries with the entry count. The old boards remain readable and are not in the sitemap.
Today's board is on the Covers Consensus page.
What this site does not do
It does not sell picks, publish a tipping record, or rank handicappers. It does not claim real-time pricing: there is no live odds feed attached to it, so any price on an archived page is the price that was available on the date that page names.
Historical pages
Every page that covered a specific date keeps its original URL, carries a banner naming that date and an archive breadcrumb, and has had its present-tense wording corrected. Pages are not deleted or redirected to tidy the archive.