Here, finally, are the final results of the BrendanLoy.com USC and ND prediction contests.
Congratulations to winners Andrew Long and Dmytro Aponte!
Coming soon: the BrendanLoy.com Bowl Pick ‘em Contest! (a.k.a., a ploy to make yourself care about the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl)
UPDATE: There was an error in the “point differential” column of the USC contest. (Hat tip: Ken.) It has now been fixed. Andrew is still the winner, but some other contestants’ placement in the standings has been affected.
If I use ESPN to host it — and so far, they’re the most viable choice I’ve found — I’ll have to. But I’d sort of prefer not to, because confidence points render the early standings irrelevant and make it impossible to tell who’s really “ahead” until the contest is over. They also require me to do much more math to figure out scenarios. :)
Do you know of any websites that run non-confidence-point-based bowl pick ‘em contests where you can create your own groups?
I run one manually on another site - the hardest part is inputting the picks into the spreadsheet - once i do that it’s pretty easy to do the formulas to autoscore it
if i could figure out how to set up a web form to input data directly into excel, i’d be very very happy.
Alas, I can’t manually run this pool because I’m going to be very busy in late December and early January. There’s this little issue of a December 30 wedding I need to attend to… :)
However, I think I’ve found a couple of sites with potential. PoolTracker assigns one point to each bowl; I e-mailed them to see if it’s possible to tweak the formula a bit (I’d like to do, maybe, 1 point per “regular” bowl, 2 for non-title game BCS bowls, 3 or 4 for the Rose Bowl). If that fails, ChicagoSports.com does 1 point per “regular” bowl, 6 per BCS bowl.
P.S. There were 135 people in last year’s NCAA Pool.
That said… my NCAA Pools have a life of their own… there are people who come to my site every March just for the NCAA Pool. (I’ve been doing it since 1996.) So I would guess maybe 50? 75? Really not sure though. Could be a lot more than that.
if i can figure out how to do the thing where data from a web form would input directly into an excel spreadsheet, i’ll volunteer to manually run your pool - whatever point format you want.
it’s late now, but i’ll try to figure it out tomorrow morning, and let you know asap
P.S. Ah, yes, your perfect day, and your 30-for-32 first round… stealing my thunder!! :) My 29-for-32 would have been a record if not for your 30-for-32… hehe.
I DEMAND A RECOUNT….well not exactly, but while Andrew won the USC contest, I am not sure if your numbers are correct. For example, after 7 games you showed Andrew with 96 points. The final 5 games were the following, showing scores, margins, Andrew’s margin and his net point deficit.
USC 55 Wash St 13 (42) (A34) - Net 8
USC 51 Stan. 21 (30) (A21) - Net 9
USC 35 Cal 10 (25) (A12) - Net 13
USC 50 Fres St 42 (8) (A19) - Net 11
USC 66 UCLA 19 (47) (A10) - Net 37
So adding 8+9+13+11+37 (78) to Andrew’s prior score of 96 gives a total of 174. And I get different scores for the rest of the people too.
Actually, I think I figured out where the apparent mistake is. Did you include the Fresno State score in your calculations? It seems that everyone is off by the amount of differential from that game.
Jay, the way brendan’s site is set up access is not going to work terribly well. A form could be written that would send you an e-mail with all the entrants info in the exact same format for easy excel importation, but thats still importing people one at a time. Unless we set up a MySQL database on Brendan’s site that would take all of the information in, and then we can output it however you want for use in excel. I could write the intake portion of this, and the send it out into one big coma return separated file. But I don’t have time to write something that would have more complex interactions with the data than that… If someone else with PHP MySQL experience does, pipe up, we might be able to build a highly functional but rather ugly pice of pool management software in a few days…
December 7th, 2005 at 3:06:57 am
do you use confidence points in your bowl pickem game or not?
December 7th, 2005 at 3:15:25 am
If I use ESPN to host it — and so far, they’re the most viable choice I’ve found — I’ll have to. But I’d sort of prefer not to, because confidence points render the early standings irrelevant and make it impossible to tell who’s really “ahead” until the contest is over. They also require me to do much more math to figure out scenarios. :)
Do you know of any websites that run non-confidence-point-based bowl pick ‘em contests where you can create your own groups?
December 7th, 2005 at 3:33:51 am
I run one manually on another site - the hardest part is inputting the picks into the spreadsheet - once i do that it’s pretty easy to do the formulas to autoscore it
if i could figure out how to set up a web form to input data directly into excel, i’d be very very happy.
December 7th, 2005 at 3:42:15 am
Heh…
Alas, I can’t manually run this pool because I’m going to be very busy in late December and early January. There’s this little issue of a December 30 wedding I need to attend to… :)
December 7th, 2005 at 3:43:32 am
yeah - understandable
how many people are you expecting to sign up for it?
December 7th, 2005 at 3:44:31 am
However, I think I’ve found a couple of sites with potential. PoolTracker assigns one point to each bowl; I e-mailed them to see if it’s possible to tweak the formula a bit (I’d like to do, maybe, 1 point per “regular” bowl, 2 for non-title game BCS bowls, 3 or 4 for the Rose Bowl). If that fails, ChicagoSports.com does 1 point per “regular” bowl, 6 per BCS bowl.
December 7th, 2005 at 3:46:10 am
Dunno… last year’s NCAA Pool had over 100, if I remember correctly… and my traffic is higher now…
December 7th, 2005 at 3:48:58 am
P.S. There were 135 people in last year’s NCAA Pool.
That said… my NCAA Pools have a life of their own… there are people who come to my site every March just for the NCAA Pool. (I’ve been doing it since 1996.) So I would guess maybe 50? 75? Really not sure though. Could be a lot more than that.
December 7th, 2005 at 3:53:22 am
yeah - i remember your ncaa hoops bracket pool - as i remember i set a record with that last march :)
December 7th, 2005 at 4:02:55 am
Let me play around with excel and access
if i can figure out how to do the thing where data from a web form would input directly into an excel spreadsheet, i’ll volunteer to manually run your pool - whatever point format you want.
it’s late now, but i’ll try to figure it out tomorrow morning, and let you know asap
December 7th, 2005 at 4:04:30 am
OK, thanks!
December 7th, 2005 at 4:16:12 am
P.S. Ah, yes, your perfect day, and your 30-for-32 first round… stealing my thunder!! :) My 29-for-32 would have been a record if not for your 30-for-32… hehe.
December 7th, 2005 at 7:04:10 am
rigged.
I want an independent investigation.
December 7th, 2005 at 7:51:28 am
I DEMAND A RECOUNT….well not exactly, but while Andrew won the USC contest, I am not sure if your numbers are correct. For example, after 7 games you showed Andrew with 96 points. The final 5 games were the following, showing scores, margins, Andrew’s margin and his net point deficit.
USC 55 Wash St 13 (42) (A34) - Net 8
USC 51 Stan. 21 (30) (A21) - Net 9
USC 35 Cal 10 (25) (A12) - Net 13
USC 50 Fres St 42 (8) (A19) - Net 11
USC 66 UCLA 19 (47) (A10) - Net 37
So adding 8+9+13+11+37 (78) to Andrew’s prior score of 96 gives a total of 174. And I get different scores for the rest of the people too.
December 7th, 2005 at 7:53:49 am
Actually, I think I figured out where the apparent mistake is. Did you include the Fresno State score in your calculations? It seems that everyone is off by the amount of differential from that game.
December 7th, 2005 at 9:26:45 am
You could write a web based system to run the pool for you…
December 7th, 2005 at 11:56:17 am
Jay, the way brendan’s site is set up access is not going to work terribly well. A form could be written that would send you an e-mail with all the entrants info in the exact same format for easy excel importation, but thats still importing people one at a time. Unless we set up a MySQL database on Brendan’s site that would take all of the information in, and then we can output it however you want for use in excel. I could write the intake portion of this, and the send it out into one big coma return separated file. But I don’t have time to write something that would have more complex interactions with the data than that… If someone else with PHP MySQL experience does, pipe up, we might be able to build a highly functional but rather ugly pice of pool management software in a few days…
December 7th, 2005 at 12:44:54 pm
it looks like we could make it work on access if we had a windows based server with access capabilities to host it on.
i don’t have one of those though, and as dane said, it wouldn’t work on your site brendan
December 7th, 2005 at 12:44:54 pm
it looks like we could make it work on access if we had a windows based server with access capabilities to host it on.
i don’t have one of those though, and as dane said, it wouldn’t work on your site brendan
December 7th, 2005 at 2:31:48 pm
Speaking of the NCAA hoops pool — WHERE IS MY T-SHIRT?!?!?!!
Fraud I say!
;)