Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Are You Smarter Than A Computer: 2012 Edition

Edit: Redditors go here. Farkers go here.

Do you look at this site and think "these guys are a bunch of idiots; I know more about football than these computers"? If so, it's time to put your ego where your mouth is and join the Tempo-Free Gridiron 2012 Pick'em.

TL;DR Version

Over the course of 12 weeks, earn points by picking the winners of college football games.

The Long Version

We run The Tempo-Free Gridiron, where we discuss our computerized systems for predicting the winners of college football games. In an effort to pit our computers against the masses, we are hosting the 2nd Annual TFG College Football Pick’em.

Who

Everyone is eligible for this contest. There’s no entry fee, and it’s all for your college football know-how honor. Think you can beat a computer that thought the 2011 Alabama squad was the #1 team in college footballover the last 10 years?

Where

We are hosting the contest at FunOfficePools.com (the same site as last year).

Pool name: TFG 2012 Pick’em

We understand the website isn’t the best in the world, but it gives us more flexibility over the scoring, which games we choose, and every aspect of managing the program. If you don’t like it, yell at Yahoo! to get off their butts and let pick’em pool owners choose which games to include each week and how to score it.

What

Each week there will be either 12 or 15 games for which you must pick the winners AND then sort the picks from least to most confident. If you get your least-confident pick correct, you get 1 point; if you get your second-least-confident pick correct, you get 2 points; etc, etc.

This means that in a week with 12 games to pick, you can score a maximum of 78 points (1+2+3+...+11+12); in a week with 15 games to pick, you can score a maximum of 120 points.

PICKS ARE DUE AT NOON, EAST COAST TIME EACH SATURDAY. THE WEBSITE WILL LOCK YOU OUT IF YOU DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR PICKS BY THIS DEADLINE.
IF YOU DO NOT GET YOUR PICKS IN BY NOON, EMAIL ME (justin@tempo-free-gridiron.com) YOUR PICKS ASAP. YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO PICK ANY GAMES THAT HAVE ALREADY STARTED, AND WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ASSIGN THE MOST VALUABLE POINTS TO ANY GAMES THAT WEEK.

(Ahem. Shouting is now officially over.)

The college football regular season has 14 weeks. It will be broken into a pre-season (picks don’t count towards the final points total) and the “regular season”.  Here is the schedule, with the date next to each week being the Saturday.

Preseason
Week 1 (Sept 1) - 12 games
Week 2 (Sept 8) - 12 games

Regular Season
Week 3 (Sept 15) - 12 games
Week 4 (Sept 22) - 12 games
Week 5 (Sept 29) - 12 games
Week 6 (Oct 6) - 15 games

Week 7 (Oct 13) - 12 games
Week 8 (Oct 20) - 12 games
Week 9 (Oct 27) - 12 games
Week 10 (Nov 3) - 15 games

Week 11 (Nov 10) - 12 games
Week 12 (Nov 17) - 12 games
Week 13 (Nov 24) - 12 games
Week 14 (Dec 1) - 15 games

You’ll see that the last week in each season is worth significantly more than the other 3 weeks.

Other

If you have any other questions, please let me know at justin@tempo-free-gridiron.com.

Good luck.

Follow us on Twitter @TFGridiron