Cover Three
An app that finds the college football games actually worth watching: a watchability score for every game and a push alert the moment a fourth quarter gets close. No ads, no tracking, no betting lines.
College football is one of my favorite sports. The problem is finding the games you need to be watching: outside of your favorite team, there are sixty-plus games on the schedule every week.
The rankings tell us who is good, not which games will be fun to watch. And by the time Twitter or TikTok tell you to turn a game on, you've missed the comeback. Cover Three answers one simple question: what game should I be watching right now? Every game gets a watchability score built from efficiency data, official rankings, and rivalries — and a push notification fires when things get close in the fourth quarter.
It's deliberately minimal: no ads, no betting lines, no engagement tricks. Open it, see what's worth your time, close it. The name is an homage to the coverage scheme — and to Saturday's three main game windows.
"Is this game worth it?" is surprisingly hard to answer.
Scoreboard apps show everything with no opinion. Rankings miss chaotic, evenly-matched games between teams that aren't on your radar. And close-game alerts from the big apps arrive late, buried in a pile of betting promos.
- Too many games and no signal for entertainment value.
- Late "close game" alerts that arrive after the moment has passed.
- Ads & gambling odds wrapped around every existing app.
There was a second, quieter problem: building this as a solo side project means no surprises for my wallet — even on a peak fall Saturday with every game live at once.
Precompute the score. Make the app almost entirely reads.
Every game gets a score blending opponent-adjusted efficiency numbers (FEI), rankings, and closeness — calibrated against real seasons so the number matches the eye test, and updated week to week as teams prove it on the field. During games, a live worker watches the scoreboard and fires a push notification the moment a fourth quarter crosses the "close" threshold.
- A calibrated watchability score for every FBS game — rivalries are surfaced but never weighted into the number.
- Push alerts within a minute of a fourth quarter getting close — while the game is still close.
- Privacy-first by default: Supabase anonymous accounts let you follow teams without ever creating a login — upgrade only if you want your picks on multiple devices.
- Mute the teams you hate — you only see their scores when they're losing.
How it came together
The architecture is shaped by one rule: user requests never touch an external API. That keeps the app fast on a phone in a stadium parking lot — and keeps a solo side project's bill near zero.
Ingest on a schedule, not on demand
Cron jobs pull live scoreboard data and weekly FEI uploads. A unit-tested scoring module writes precomputed watchability scores into Postgres.
Serve everything from the edge
User requests only ever read: cached at the edge with stale-while-revalidate, with Redis behind it. Feeds are instant even on a peak Saturday with every game live at once.
Watch the fourth quarter live
A live worker watches the scoreboard and fires a Web Push notification within a minute of a game crossing the "close" threshold — including the iOS dance, where notifications only work once the PWA is added to the home screen (a gentle nudge handles that).
Hand-roll the design system
No Tailwind, no UI kit — a hand-rolled SCSS + BEM system with self-hosted Greycliff and Inter. Nothing loads from Google.
Keep the analytics first-party
An owner-only admin dashboard of SQL aggregates (WAU/MAU, top followed teams) instead of a third-party analytics suite. Even the A/B test on onboarding is home-grown.
A better way to watch football.
The 2025 season ran end to end on it with a small group of users: scores precomputed, feeds instant from edge cache, close-game alerts landing while the game was still close. Now it's out and publicly available. It loads fast on a phone in a stadium parking lot, respects your attention, and costs almost nothing to run.
Mostly, it does the one thing it promises: one look on a Saturday morning and you know where the good football is.
Visit cover3.app