Bowl Pool - 9 games in.

 Hello again everyone.  Before I get into the results of the day, and there were a lot of them, I have a couple of announcements.  I think it’s really important that I make these announcements prior to revealing the standings.  The reasons for that will be pretty obvious once we get there.

The first one is that if you want to play along at home, do your own analysis, check scores ahead of time, etc. I have put the spreadsheet I use to keep score in a Google drive.  The address for that is here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zyoo2TlSxSAeX1mofQ7MttzqLjXwL68T/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=115935305822530497124&rtpof=true&sd=true

If you happen to be good at Excel, there are some pretty cool things in there.  There are A LOT of tables I use when writing this stuff up if anyone is curious about those.

This also serves a couple of different purposes.  The first is to make sure what I have for your picks is what you actually picked.  For people that used the template, I just copied and pasted, but for people that sent me PDFs, you may want to check to make sure I transcribed them correctly.

The second is that allows you to keep me honest.  If I was less ethical, I could put out scores throughout the bowl pool season and then miraculously win it in the end and not show anyone the picks.  That’s one of the nicer things about this pool.  If you want to see everything, go right ahead.

The next announcement is about how I picked my teams.  I think I mentioned that I hardly watched any college football this season.  As such, I didn’t have too many strong feelings about the games.  I could have just went by the point spreads, but I found an article in my news feed where some guy had developed a system for picking games based on a simple points system in the regular season.  I modified it slightly and submitted it as my picks.  It’s not against the rules to do that, but in case anyone was wondering why I picked Liberty for some points despite railing hard against them in the last post.  The system was the reason.

With all of that out of the way, let’s get to the games.  There were 7 today and we’ve had 9 overall.  So far, underdogs have won outright in 5 of those games, including two double digit underdogs and 2 more that were 7 or more point underdogs.  That’s kind of better than I could have ever hoped for.  I love upsets.

So, no one is winless and no one is undefeated.  The last undefeated sheet was Stefan K, who was 4-0 before taking his first loss (UTEP in the New Mexico Bowl for 1 point).  On the other side, Larry G. #1 was the last person to notch a win, starting off 0-7 before hitting with Utah State for 3 points in the LA Bowl.

Compliments of the aforementioned upsets, the most games anyone has picked correctly is 6.  4 people have pulled this off so far.  This is a good time to mention someone in particular who is perhaps the biggest winner of the day, but also potentially the biggest loser of the day.  Doug L. has a very strange sheet so far.  He is one of the 4 people that has picked 6 games correctly.  You would think that would put him way up in the standings, but because he weighted most of his games later the calendar, he is currently sitting in 50^th place in total points.  This is part of the reason I don’t like back-weighting the points.  There is no guarantee that Doug L. can keep up his good picking, but he’s going to have to if he wants to win because all of his good picking so far isn’t really helping him.  I don’t know, maybe he really liked the later games more, but based on how his points are distributed, it kind of looks like a modified 1-43 point system.  I often discourage this from people – just from a enjoyment perspective.  43-1 actually feels more fun, since you can see your name at the top of the standings, and then try to hold on and survive the wave.  Everyone can do what they want, and if Doug L. wins, his method was the right one and he can tell me to pound sand.  For now, his sheet looks like quite the outlier.

One the flip side, only 2 people have just one win in 9 games.  That’s rough….  All I can say to Tom B, and Amy L is that everyone can win 981 total points, and you two have only used 224 and 177 points respectively, so there’s still time.  You do have to go on a good run though.  Still, I’m sure you’re not mathematically eliminated yet from 1^st, 2^nd or 3^rd.  There’s way too much variation left for that to be true.

So, if you want to see where we started the day, you can go to the previous post.  As for today only, There are probably 3 ways to figure out who the big winners were.  First, the number games picked correctly.  The big winner on the day for this stat was the previously mentioned Doug L.  He was the only person today to nail 6 games out of the 7.  Unfortunately for him, he only got 34 points for his prowess.  That is a terrible return.  The only game he missed all day was the LA Bowl.  That wasn’t the one I would have expected.  That’s pretty incredible.  Too bad he’s not rewarded more for it.  For what it’s worth, the average sheet got 3.1 / 7 games right.

The second way to figure out the winners for the day are total points won.  That honor goes to me.  I only got 4 games right, but those 4 games won me 141 points today.  I won 30 on WKU, 41 on Fresno State, 39 on Liberty and 31 on Louisiana.  I had a really good day.  I lost 43 points on Jackson State, but since virtually everyone lost a ton of points on that game, it didn’t hurt too bad.  Take all this with a slight grain of salt.  I had to wager 213 points to get all those points.  The average number of points won on Saturday was 72.7.

The third (and maybe most important) way to figure out who won today is based on net points (Won points – points lost).  That honor goes to Jason S.  He managed to net 75 points today.  He won 5 games for a total of 102 points and only lost 27 points in the games he lost.  That includes a whopping 23 points for South Carolina State.  He only lost 7 on Marshall and 20 on BYU.  That means he had the healthiest sheet of the day.  Fun fact, as a group we lost more points today than we won.  The average entry lost 13.3 points today.  What that means is that if you managed to break even today, you probably moved up in the net points standings.

All right, enough breakdown of the points.  Here are the points standings:

1. Klei R.: 183 (-108)

2. Daniel E.: 178 (-123)

3. Josiah T. #1: 169 (-134)

4. Scott H. #2: 156 (-129)

5. Hutch H.: 153 (-111)

6. Larry G. #2: 146 (-124)

7. Jason S.: 144 (-70)

8. Mike W.: 142 (-120)

9. Chad L.: 142 (-139)

10. Adam E.: 141 (-131)

11. Matt N.: 140 (-113)

12. Ben S.: 133 (-84)

13. Jay H. #2: 131 (-147)

14. Pete J. #2: 121 (-146)

15. Josiah T. #2: 121 (-147)

16. Pete J. #1: 120 (-147)

17. Michelle L. #1: 111 (-176)

18. Marc R.: 110 (-81)

19. Brian K.: 109 (-64)

20. Becky H.: 108 (-52)

21. Adam O. #1: 108 (-123)

22. Dylan B.: 107 (-145)

23. Dylan L.: 106 (-98)

24. Jay H. #1: 104 (-90)

25. Mike N.: 104 (-100)

26. Ally H.: 101 (-102)

27. Adam O. #4: 100 (-123)

28. Adam O. #3: 99 (-108)

29. Stefan K.: 98 (-56)

30. Adam O. #2: 93 (-123)

31. Emily T.: 93 (-156)

31. Grant F.: 93 (-156)

33. Weston T. (Shane): 90 (-106)

34. Brent S.: 88 (-117)

35. Brad R.: 85 (-82)

36. Matt M.: 84 (-95)

37. Dan D.: 81 (-51)

38. Michelle L. #2: 81 (-178)

39. Lee K.: 80 (-118)

40. Creighton H.: 74 (-107)

41. Scott H. #1: 73 (-167)

42. Brett W.: 69 (-78)

43. Damien R.: 69 (-169)

44. Cam L.: 67 (-110)

45. Mark A.: 67 (-125)

46. Dustin B.: 59 (-92)

47. Ryan W.: 49 (-99)

48. Amy L.: 41 (-183)

49. Larry G. #1: 35 (-209)

50. Doug L.: 34 (-14)

51. Tom B.: 23 (-154)

…and the net points rankings:

1. Klei R.: 75

2. Jason S.: 74

3. Becky H.: 56

4. Daniel E.: 55

5. Ben S.: 49

6. Brian K.: 45

7. Hutch H.: 42

7. Stefan K.: 42

9. Josiah T. #1: 35

10. Dan D.: 30

11. Marc R.: 29

12. Scott H. #2: 27

12. Matt N.: 27

14. Larry G. #2: 22

14. Mike W.: 22

16. Doug L.: 20

17. Jay H. #1: 14

18. Adam E.: 10

19. Dylan L.: 8

20. Mike N.: 4

21. Chad L.: 3

21. Brad R.: 3

23. Ally H.: -1

24. Adam O. #3: -9

24. Brett W.: -9

26. Matt M.: -11

27. Adam O. #1: -15

28. Jay H. #2: -16

28. Weston T. (Shane): -16

30. Adam O. #4: -23

31. Pete J. #2: -25

32. Josiah T. #2: -26

33. Pete J. #1: -27

34. Brent S.: -29

35. Adam O. #2: -30

36. Creighton H.: -33

36. Dustin B.: -33

38. Dylan B.: -38

38. Lee K.: -38

40. Cam L.: -43

41. Ryan W.: -50

42. Mark A.: -58

43. Emily T.: -63

43. Grant F.: -63

45. Michelle L. #1: -65

46. Scott H. #1: -94

47. Michelle L. #2: -97

48. Damien R.: -100

49. Tom B.: -131

50. Amy L.: -142

51. Larry G. #1: -174

 

You can see why I thought I needed a disclaimer before putting out the standings.  I had a really good day today.  Even losing the BYU / UAB game helped me out since I was below the median points.  What I mean by that is that the median pick in that game was BYU for 33 points.  I took BYU for 18, so even though I lost points in that game, I actually moved up in the net points standings because more than half the field lost more points than me.  I love finding stuff like that.

Anyway, a few more notes about today:

I actually started the day watching a few of the games.  I watched most of the Boca Raton game, and virtually all of the Celebration Bowl.  After that, I lost a lot of steam.  I didn’t watch a second of the Lending Tree Bowl, and the last 2 games of the day I was streaming on my iPad while I was watching other stuff.

There was a lot of bad tackling in these games.  Maybe that’s a product of them being teams that mostly weren’t from the best teams.  It seemed especially bad in the Boca Raton Bowl.  I think the QB for Western Kentucky had 300 yards passing at halftime.  It was a little nuts.

I never heard the announcers in the Celebration Bowl call Deion Sanders anything but “Coach Prime”.  Did he legally change his name or something?  Is he like Marvelous Marvin Hagler or Ye?  I found this a little weird.

I thought it was funny that the urinal cakes at the LA Bowl had a picture of Matt Damon on them.

Even though I won a bunch of points with Liberty today, they still suck.

OK.  That’s it for today.  Tomorrow is NFL day, so you can take a break from the Bowl Pool for a day.  The schedule eases up a little over the next week, which is nice.  There’s only one game on Monday, so I’ll just do the breakdown here:

Myrtle Beach Bowl Presented by Taxact (2:30 on ESPN)

Vegas Line: Tulsa -9

Median Pick: Tulsa for 33 points.

Picks for Tulsa: 44 (31.23 points average, 1374 total points, 8^th)

Picks for Old Dominion: 7 (8.71 points average, 61 total points, 84th)

Total points wagered: 1435 (12^th)

Pick distribution:

Fun fact: We’ve played 5 of the top 10 games in terms of points wagered, and the underdog has won 3 of them.  Second fun fact: UAB has the least amount of points wagered on it, and they won.  The main reason I bring this up is that of all the team yet to play, Old Dominion has the fewest points wagered on it.  The way this season is going, they may win going away.  That’s also my pathetic way to try and convince you to watch this game, since it’s being played in the middle of the afternoon.  I guess they didn’t want to compete with the NFL on Monday Night.

As an aside, this is the third variation of naming of Bowl Games.  So far, we’ve seen “Company X Object Bowl”, and “Company X Bowl”.  I said the latter was the Deluxe package.  I’m not sure what “Object Bowl Presented by Company X” is.  I kind of don’t like it.  I think we’ll have one more variation, and that’s the games that called a “Classic” instead of a Bowl game.  My favorite of these is the Frisco Football Classic, which is so much of a classic that this will be the first one ever played.  Seriously, who decides these things?

Anyway, I’m sure the game will be fantastic, or at least more fantastic than what most of us will be doing at 2:30 on a Monday afternoon.  Enjoy accordingly.

Good luck!!!!