Mike Francesa Listeners Play "Witching Hour" Game Together on NFL Sundays

The witching hou-ah has been a staple term of Mike Francesa’s radio show over the years. The name, which Francesa acquired from Brent Musburger ages ago on CBS’s NFL Today, refers to the way all the scores twist and turn in the final hour of Sunday’s early afternoon NFL slate. Die hard Francesa listeners have formed a tight-knit Twitter community over the years. Though Francesa was at first sensitive to the idea that they were laughing at and not with him, he’s come to embrace it. The culmination of this occurred when he appeared at FrancesaCon.

Mark Mongo, who was a studio guest of Francesa’s a couple months ago (see below), created a game last season derived from Francesa’s proclamation to “write down” the scores before the witching hour. The contest is a little bit complicated, so I asked him to explain:

RG: How does the game work?

MM: I write down all of the scores of the 1:00 games and post a picture of if with a link to a Google Form at 2:55. Participants then pick three teams that they think can come back to win (In order of confidence) their game along with the projected final score for each team. You get 5 points for the first pick, 3 for the second and 1 for the 3rd pick. I add up the totals and the person with the most points wins. Tiebreaks are then done by how close each person was to the final score of their picks.

RG: Is there any entry fee? What’s the prize?

MM: The game is free to play and Michael Leboff and Ron Haraka, the founders of FrancesaCon, send a Mongo Nation or FrancesaCon shirt to the winner

RG: When did the game start?

MM: I started the game last year in week 6. I was going to be at my son’s baseball and I was the official scorer, so I decided to keep myself occupied with something. Decided to come up with a game to play along with on Twitter and keep an eye on the 1:00 games. The game evolved over time as more people started playing. At first I had it as a 15 minute window to make the picks (2:45 to 3:00) but then I realized there was too much scoring during that window so I moved it to 2:55 to 3:00.

RG: How many people play?

MM: Last week 43 people participated, which was above the previous record of 31 from last year.

RG: How much time do you spend on this?

MM: The game doesn’t take much time to administer, especially since this year I am using the Google Form, which puts all the entries into a spreadsheet for scoring. The trickiest part is making sure all the scores are correct when I tweet them out and make the form live.

There are Storifies here and here that show how this works in real time. This is Mark’s appearance on Francesa a few weeks ago: