Comments on: NFL picks behind the scenes

By: JBLoper

JBLoper — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:25:59 +0000

Colorado School of Mines has a football team?!?!?! Wow, who knew? certainly not a Nebraska-Kearney fan. It’s Chadron State, Nebraska-Omaha, Wayne State and then everybody else. CSM isn’t even a blip on our rivalry radar.

Not that anyone reading this cares…

By: Nate

Nate — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:59:03 +0000

Wow, Joe picked the exact score for the Minnesota – Detroit game http://www.nfl.com/gamecenter/boxscore?game_id=29606&displayPage=tab_box_score&season=2008&week=REG6

Sportswriters are so good at picking NFL games…

By: Learned Hand

Learned Hand — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:55:51 +0000

“This is like playing a bar game where you look around the room and guess, based on appearance, if someone is a Republican or Democrat…” Are you not familiar with the phenomenon known as Republican Face?

http://frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/gov2/uploaded_images/mcconnell-753483.jpg

http://www.billadler.com/reed/feature_tmpltimage.jpg

http://www.foxnews.com/images/326215/3_61_lott_trent.jpg

http://www.clevelandleader.com/files/dennis-hastert.jpg

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:37:21 +0000

“Has any team in sports history, by the way, spent more time unveiling new and washed up stars and pretending like this will turn around the teamâ€™s fortunes?”

Well, as a Red Sox fan, in the days before the good times, the Sox would annually land some singularly unexciting (washed up) player and tell us that this was the man to lead us to the promised land.

Andre Dawson, Jack Clark, Tom Brunansky, Jeff Reardon, Jose Canseco, Jose Offerman…

By: George

George — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:03:35 +0000

Once back in college, I was, basically compelled to enter into a Final Four pool run by my Residence Hall director. About a hundred entries or so all told. His office was across from my room.

Now, I loathe basketball. Just loathe it. So to show my disdain for the whole exercise, I filled out one pick sheet with the team with the best record winning every game. I then filled out a second sheet with a few tweaks (Georgetown over some no-name place in the first round was one of them).

Anyhow, as the tournament progressed my picks were doing well. Very well. And my boss would glare into my room every day. The deeper we went into the tournament, the better my picks were doing…and the angrier and angrier my boss was getting that a guy who proudly expressed his complete ignorance of college hoops was driving toward a victory in his office pool.

In the end, my picks placed number one (the tweaked set) and number three (the simple best record picks). Now think about that for a minute. Over 100 picks made, most by people who styled themselves fans of the game–some rabidly so–and over 95 percent of them couldn’t beat a simple system that picked using win-loss record!

By: matt

matt — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:41:36 +0000

a fairly common football score is home team 20, visiting team 17. pick that every game and you’ll do better than every ‘expert’ out there.

By: Mikey

Mikey — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:51:48 +0000

Good job, Mitch. So it happens about once every 500 games. How silly of me to think it was an unusual event.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 03:01:56 +0000

I couldn’t care less about golf, but I laughed out loud at picking the bye over the Chiefs. Thanks, Joe.

By: Dub

Dub — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:32:08 +0000

12-10 sounds like every Ohio State-Michigan score of the Bo-Woody years.

By: Mitch Overbye

Mitch Overbye — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:01:46 +0000

Ok, so I checked the schedule for every season until I found five (not including today). Counting today’s MN-DET game, there have been six since 1994, including two in consecutive weeks in 2003.