College football returns two weeks from tonight. Giddy up.
We've opened our 2012 picks pool at Fun Office Pools - if you played last year, you should've received an email inviting you to join up again this year. If not, you can go to the FOP website at that link, then search for "Rocky Top Talk 2012" to enter. The picks contest is completely free and a source of great entertainment on this site every fall.
Gameday Depot will once again be sponsoring the contest and awarding prizes in the form of $10 gift certificates (via coupon codes by email) to weekly winners and a yet-to-be-determined grand prize for the overall season winner. If you haven't been to the store in awhile, you should check it out, because there's a lot of great new apparel and merchandise for Vols fans over there. There are still some missing categories (jerseys, notably) and missing images, but Joel's working feverishly on several things, including that. It's the reason he's been a bit scarce here.
Anyway, because prizes are involved, there will be rules. We'll be tweaking last year's rules a bit, but they'll largely be the same, including procedures for determining tiebreakers, prohibitions against winning more than once in any given month (except for the grand prize winner, for whom winning a weekly won't make him or her ineligible for the grand prize), and prohibitions against playing/winning multiple pools across the SBN network. There may be more, and they're subject to change, and you're subject to them if you play.
If you're new, here's how the contest works:
- We pick 20 games every week, straight up.
- We use confidence points, meaning you assign 20 points to the pick you're most confident in, 1 point to the pick you're least confident in, etc.
- We will always pick SEC games, all the major contests, and we tend to find a way to get Bowling Green in there just so I can pick against them. Very professional. But the FOP website allows you to suggest matchups - I really do look at and use these because there are usually around 15-18 no-brainer matchups every week, but a couple of spots to fill after that.
- Picks lock before the kickoff of each game. We will always pick the Thursday night ESPN game, so don't forget to get your picks in for that one.
- The tiebreaker each week is the score of the Tennessee game.
Any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments. The week one matchups aren't open to pick yet and will apparently open August 25 (don't worry, we'll remind you), but you can view them now. Sign up, tell a friend, good luck.