We use a computer model of a real fruit fly brain. For each team, we "feed" the fly a sugary flavor based on that team's name. Whichever team makes the fly want to eat more gets the pick.
The neuroscience is real. The football part is nonsense. The fly knows nothing about football. It just likes some flavors more than others. Not betting advice.
Step by step
The brain. Researchers took electron microscope images of an entire adult fruit fly brain and traced every neuron (about 139,000 of them) and every synapse. That wiring diagram is the FlyWire connectome.
The model. Each neuron becomes a simple "leaky integrate-and-fire" unit: it builds up charge from the neurons wired into it and fires a spike when it crosses a threshold. The connections, and whether each one excites or inhibits, come straight from the connectome.
Each team gets a flavor. The team's name, like Bears −3 (against the spread) or Bears (straight up), is turned into a number. That number chooses half of the fly's sugar-taste neurons. Using half means every team pokes a different mix, so every team tastes a little different.
Feed the fly. Those taste neurons are stimulated for one simulated second, and the signal spreads through the brain.
Measure hunger. We watch MN9, a pair of motor neurons that drive the fly's feeding reflex, and count how fast they fire.
Tastier team wins. Whichever team makes MN9 fire harder is the pick.
When each game gets picked
Every game is picked at 4:00am Pacific (7:00am Eastern) on the day it's played, using the DraftKings point spread shown on ESPN at that moment. That's before every kickoff, including early international games. Once a pick is made it never changes, and no game is ever picked after it starts. Each card shows the time its game was picked.
If there's no line yet at 4:00am, the straight-up pick is made on time and the spread pick is made as soon as a line appears, still before kickoff. Week 1's Wednesday through Sunday games were picked before this schedule started: Sunday games used the Sept 11 lines, and the Wednesday and Thursday games used their closing lines.
Is it random?
No. Every random choice is seeded by the team's name, so the same name always gets the same neurons, the same spikes, and the same pick, no matter how many times you run it. Change the spread from −3 to −3.5 and it's a brand-new flavor.
The brain viewer
"Visualize the decision" on each pick replays the actual simulation. Every faint dot is one neuron at its real position in the brain. The link to 3D meshes opens those neurons in Neuroglancer, Google's viewer for huge 3D imaging datasets.
Sources
FlyWire
The whole-brain connectome project, led by Princeton University (Seung and Murthy labs) with a worldwide community of proofreaders. We use release v783.