My Weekly NFL Pool (which I humbly submit as the greatest system ever)

I participate in a weekly NFL with friends and family. There's no money involved, because I'm in grad school and thus need to refrain until I have an actual income. There aren't really any bragging rights involved either (unless I happen to win). The real purpose is to unleash my deepest introspections and NFL meditations on innocent family members and friends (see "Week By Week NFL Thoughts").

Anyway, I'm trailing my father in our pool, but I don't feel too bad because he actually performs regression analysis to make his picks. I'm not making thisup. What's weird is, this is also the same man who frequently can't remembermy phone number and address, even though I've personally entered both into hiscell phone, PDA, and address book, and shown him repeatedly how to look themup. He's Rain Man like that.

My wife also plays, but her picks technically aren't factually-based. She picks"Green Bay" because it sounds like "Green Day" (her favorite band). And shepicks animals she likes, so the Dolphins, Seahawks, Ravens, Cardinals, andColts are always winners (for her, the conflict is when they end up playingeach other, in which case she picks whichever team's colors are "prettiest"). She's more or less the control group to make me feel better about wasting allthose hours researching teams.I like our system.

The way we play is, however many games there are this week, that's how many points you have to put down. So let's say there are fourteen games this week. What you have to do is pick the winner of each game, and assign a number from 1-14 for each game, with 1 being the pick you're least confident in, and 14 being the one you're most confident in. So for last Monday's Bears-Cardinals game, I had 13 on the Bears (which I ended up immensely regretting for about 3.5 quarters). Meanwhile my 1-pointer last week was the Jets to beat the Dolphins. You have to use every number and you can only use a number once, so it's a forced distribution. If the team wins, you get the points; if not you get zero, and the person with the most points wins. The team only needs to win; no spreads. You should try it this weekend and see how you do.

Some weeks are harder than others, and you end up just wanting to put "1" on every game. Other times, you end up rooting for a team to lose even though you picked them, because you only had 1 on them while some knucklehead (in this case, my best friend Aaron) put a ridiculously high number on them (10, to be specific--on the JETS!!). And in case you're wondering, for games like the Dolphins-Jets, yes, you DO have to pick someone to win.

Okay, this blog has been EXTREMELY dorky, even by my standards, barely one step cooler than bragging their World of Warcraft quests. But I like our system, and it's pretty cool when you stop and think about it...although I'm notsure why someone actually WOULD stop and think about it.