Rusty’s Blog

NCAA Picks will be very similar to past years, with a few adjustments. If I’ve missed anything or if you think any of these rules sound ridiculous, please say so in the comments. Here’s how it will work:

Early in the week (hopefully no later than Tuesday), I’ll post results from the previous week and a schedule for the current week. The schedule will contain all games among teams ranked in the Top 25 in the USA Today Coaches’ poll, followed by the line as it stands whenever I create the schedule (lines sometimes change in real life, but will be frozen at the time when I write the post here).

Here is an example of what a schedule will look like:

Saturday, October 1, 2008
#3 Ohio State @ #19 Tennessee
Line: Ohio State by 2

#11 Auburn @ South Carolina
Line: Auburn by 6

#24 Michigan @ Alabama
Line: Alabama by 3

You would enter your picks for that week by saying who you think won’t cover the spread. I’ll provide an example, but before we get to that there are…

New rules

• You must pick a minimum of one team not to cover every week, unless there’s only one game being played that week. This is to avoid a situation where people just sit around taking the favorites every week and end up in the running at the end of the season despite what can only be described as cowardice in their picking decisions.
• Game of the Week tiebreaker. In the event of a tie, we will need a tiebreaker. So I plan to choose a Game of the Week, for which players will be asked to guess the exact score of the game. If two or more players finish with the same number of points in a given week, whichever player is closest to guessing the exact score of the Game of the Week will be declared winner for the week.
  
  If the season ends and two players are still tied, whichever player won the most weeks will be declared the winner. If they’re still tied after that, we’ll add up the points to see who was closest to picking exact scores. In the unlikely event they’re still somehow tied after that, then the contest will end in a tie.
  
  Players cannot enter a score for a Game of the Week prediction that has already been entered by another player. I realize this will make some of the later guesses ridiculously off base. I won’t deny it you ask me if this is a motivational tool to encourage people to submit their picks as early as possible.
• No more get out of jail free card. Miss a week? Tough. In past contests, I used to throw out every player’s worst week in order to make it okay for a player to miss a week and still be able to compete. I’m ending that practice this year.

How to enter picks

So, using the sample schedule above and taking the new rules into account, let’s say the game of the week is Ohio State-Tennessee.

If you think Alabama will win by at least 3, Auburn will win by at least 6, but that Ohio State will either win by one point or lose, then you’d enter your picks by saying:

Ohio State won’t cover, Tennessee wins the GOTW 20-17.

If you think both Ohio State and Alabama will lose or not cover their respective spreads, you’d say:

Ohio State and Alabama won’t cover, Tennessee wins the GOTW 20-17.

And so forth. Side note: I promise every Game of the Week won’t be a Tennessee game. It might not even necessarily be the best game. Just one that I find intriguing for one reason or another.

Scoring

1 point for a correct pick, 0 points for an incorrect pick.

Deadlines

Your picks for any given game must be submitted before kickoff of the games you’re picking. If there’s a Thursday night game and you submit your picks on Friday, you get an automatic zero for the Thursday night game but your Saturday picks will still count. Even one minute after kickoff counts as a zero, no exceptions.

I mentioned earlier that last year’s NCAA Picks sucked, and that this was due to using Yahoo’s crappy system instead of just having everyone enter their picks in the comments section as in past years. It subsequently lacked the trash talking that made prior contests fun.

So here’s the deal: we’re going back to the old way of entering picks in the comments threads, and me manually compiling the results.

Sign up by leaving a comment in this thread.

I’ll post formal rules soon. The first game is August 28, so I’ll post a week 1 schedule the Monday before that.

A benefit of writing blogs is you can revisit your old self occasionally, check in, and compare notes. Since interviews seem to be the new black this week, I thought this would be a good time to see how things are going for myself circa August 2004.

But first, a disclaimer: when conducting an interview with your past self, you must be careful not to reveal any information about the future which might set your past self on an alternate timeline. You might be tempted, as Biff was in Back to the Future II for example, to send your past self future sports scores so your current self may reap the profits.

Don’t.

You might destroy the entire space-time continuum, or you may end up sending yourself crippling addictions to ketamine, nickel-plated revolvers, and expensive champagne. Don’t ask questions, that’s just how The Rule of Unintended Consequences works. It won’t end well.

With that in mind…

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If you participated in my NCAA Picks contest last year, one thing might have stood out to you: it sucked. Worst Picks ever out of the four times I’ve hosted one. This is because I made the mistake of hosting it on Yahoo, which appears not to have been upgraded since 1996 or so.

The year before that, I actually wrote an AJAX blog widget to do all the work for me. It was better than last year, but IMO not as much fun as the two years prior to that. And one or two people had problems with it, which kind of killed the fun for me.

So, we need a different approach this year. The reason I quit compiling them manually and went to using software is because it’s a lot of damn work. But that also led to comment threads 30 or 40 long with the trash talking that makes these contests fun, since people were forced to comment to enter their picks. I’m thinking of going back to that and capping the contest at a certain number of people to keep it from being too much work to compile the results.

Sound good? Any other bright ideas?

Here’s the new blog. I have no real plans for it yet other than to host another NCAA Picks contest. We’ll see from there.