The 5th annual Living Room Times Bowl Pick ’em Contest is open for signups. To enter, just click here, then follow the links to either create an ESPN.com account or sign into your existing account, and enter your picks. (You can change your pick for each game up until kickoff time.)
Because the contest is being run through ESPN, which has extremely limited group customization features, the scoring system will be quite simple: 1 point per correct bowl-game pick. No spread, no confidence points; just pick the winner of each game. So the person with the best win-loss record in predicting the 34 bowls will be the contest champion. Any ties will be broken by rules #1-3 here, with the “Tiebreaker Game” being the Alabama-Texas championship game.
Last year, using this same scoring system, Amy Booth won with a prediction record of 21-13, defeating Sören Hammerschmidt on a tiebreaker. Prior winners (under the older, more complex scoring system, when the contest was run through the now-defunct collegefantasysports.com bowl pick ’em system) are Seth Carmack in 2007-08, Ben Sloniker in 2006-07, and Brian Dupuis in 2005-06.
As per usual, there will be no physical prize for this year’s winner — just digital glory among your peers here on the blog (and Facebook, Twitter, etc.). For this reason, contestants are encouraged to make their “pick set names” recognizable, whether as your real name, or as a regularly used blog comment handle / Twitter username / whatever, so that people (including me) will know who you are. After all, you can’t bask in the glory of a hard-earned victory if your entry is virtually anonymous!
This year’s first bowl game kicks off at 4:30 PM Eastern on Saturday, December 19.
I like this – one deadline!
I can’t handle a week to week pick em. But this one, I can do.
Heh. Me neither. I forgot to make my picks for one week of games, sometime in October, and then proceeded to completely give up on the contest. I finished with a record of 83-175. Judging by the fact that this was good enough for 18th place out of 30, I clearly wasn’t alone. 🙂
Of course, technically this contest has 34 separate deadlines (one for each bowl), as you can make/change your picks for each game right up until kickoff. But you don’t HAVE to — you CAN make all your picks at once — so it’s much more convenient than the season-long contest, in which each week’s slate of games to be picked isn’t even determined until the week of.
Yep. Exactly what happened to me. 😉 And then I’d get emails from Yahoo in November reminding me to pick the games this week for the Pick ‘Em!
Well the obvious solution is to have the complete pick em for next year done before the season even starts 🙂