Radical Georgia Moderate

A miserable performance by most in the bowl picks, save for our winner Carl Lindecrantz and a couple of others. Congratulations Carl! I’ll be contacting you shortly to arrange for your prize to be sent. Thanks to everyone for playing. I’ll probably write more thoughts on this year’s Picks contest later and the bowl season later.

Here is the form for the final round of NCAA Picks, with lines on the bowl games. There’s still a chance for the top 10 players or so to win theoretically. Click here to see the scores heading into the final round.

I’ve only included bowls where ranked teams are playing. If I win, then whomever is second place will win the $50 Amazon gift card (but I will still retain bragging rights). If the contest ends in a tie for first (or second if I’m the outright winner), then tiebreakers will go in this order:

• Whoever is not me
• Whose Favorites % was lower over the course of the entire contest (i.e. - who was the bolder bettor)
• Whose score was higher for the final round
• Whose Favorites % was lower in the final round
• Who has been ranked higher than the other during more rounds over the course of the entire contest

If scores are still somehow tied after that, then the contest will just have to be called a tie and I’ll split the pot.

Bowl Odds

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< ?php if (time() > 1168304400) { print ‘The bowl form has expired. You can find the latest NCAA Picks form on my homepage.’; } ?>

I have no idea when bowl selections will be final, so I’m going to go ahead and post Picks scores heading into the bowl games. It warmed my heart to see USC lose and make yet another mess of the BCS. I think Florida should play in the title game, but that Michigan will end up there. And it will be boring. And it will render the regular season meeting between TOSU and Michigan completely pointless.

This is where I should make a joke about Georgia retiring Reggie Ball’s number. But I won’t. The situation is too dire for jokes. Unlike Peyton Manning, who never beat Florida, Ball has no NFL future to make people forget about his inability to beat Georgia. And unlike Manning, Ball lost on at least one and possibly two occasions to a markedly inferior team due almost entirely to his poor play.

In fact, the best thing that will happen to Ball for the rest of his life will be for me to mention him in the same sentence as Peyton Manning, an accolade he doesn’t deserve even when comparing the worst of their statistics. No, what’s in store for Ball is a Sonny Liston-Mike Tyson-style carnival of depravity, only without the fame and drugs and illusion of fortune to blind him to what he’s become. He’s doomed to watch it happen.

He’s Roy Munson and Ray Finkel. When future Georgia Tech quarterbacks lose even a single game to the Puppies from Athens, they’ll instantly draw comparisons to Ball, whose shady legacy will be dragged through the gutter for generations long after his bloated body turns up in the Chattahoochee, penniless and weighed down by vodka.

I recommend that Tech fans start a fund to hire a personal “bodyguard” for Ball to protect him from himself. Everything he touches shows promise then whithers and dies violently, so he shouldn’t be allowed to touch himself.

Guess we don’t have to worry about that undefeated Rutgers scenario now, eh?

Good luck to the Rambling Wreck this weekend.

I bounced back to first in the overall standings using blood money (points really, but it doesn’t have the same ring), betting against my own team. And they were ritually executed, gangster style, in front of a prime time audience. The fucking running back threw a touchdown.

Vanderbilt and Kentucky are the difference between a respectable 9-3 regular season and a disappointing, coaches’ job-threatening 7-5 season. Georgia has demonstrated that neither of those games are gimmes. Beware of the 9.5-point spread on UT-Vandy this weekend, particularly if Erik Ainge is still out.

Here it is. I tanked last week. And I need an intern to enter all this shit for me. Send resumés here. There ought to be a lot of Democratic operatives in this state with nothing to do now. Yeesh.

Here it is, on time for once. This has been the craziest three days in a long time. I have no energy for further banter. Proceed.

Lookee here, a four-way tie for first, yee haw! I’m concerned about the South Carolina game this weekend, and will just leave it at that.

My Internets was on the fritz last night, as it has been for a while now (a plague on both your houses, Ralph and Brian Roberts). I hope I can finish some things at work in time to finish entering games early this afternoon, but it’s possible I may not get time until tonight.