Pot has offically been crashed!

Quick!  Everybody in the pool!

Our old record of 2,155 has been killed.  The best part of all of this is that the extra picks I handed out to people only drove the pot higher; we would have broken the record without my freebies to my assistants!  I also challenged you to screw me over and have the pot top 2,500 so I would have to adjust the spreadsheet.  I, of course, was hoping for a pot in the 2,300-2,450 range so we could beat our record without me having to reformat the main sheet.  I’m really happy we missed that because look at what time I’m posting this thing!

Ready for the total?  The Week 9 NFL pot is a new record of 2,480!!! That’s right - five more entries and I would have been over my current spreadsheet limit.  For those of you who use the spreadsheet (which should be all of you, truthfully) you’ll see all of 4 open slots.  496 entries this week!

The italicized picks (columns 7-54) were the ones I handed out to people.  I italicized them because if one of them wins, and they would not have played it had it not been for me…. well, you can imagine how I’ll spin that when I see them.

A couple of quickies in the sheet - there are a few people in there as phone numbers; one person did not write a name and another one was so far beyond legible three of us could not make out any definite letters.  I hope they were trashed at the time they attempted to sign their name because that one is rough!

I’m not going to do the picks within the pool (go download the spreadsheet and read them yourself - I’m tired AND we have a 10am meeting on PGA) but I will tell you that in one game, the unthinkable happened in a pool of this size.  In the Arizona - Chicago game, 248 people picked the Cardinals, 248 people picked the Bears.  We actually have an exact 50/50 pick in our largest pot ever!  Go figure that one!

I would tell you what the most important games are, but if you have one loss this week you better hope it is a MAJOR upset (Tampa Bay, Carolina, Washington, Detroit) because you have to figure with how close some of the picks are, losing one “close” game should (theoretically) knock you out of the pot.  If you’re still perfect going into Philadelphia, THEN you can start to get excited.

I’ll do the possibilities after the Sunday Night Game.  If it’s upset weekend and there are not still 50+ people alive with two games to play, I might post them after the 4:15 games.  Either way, go download the spreadsheet!  If you’ve never used it before it is very simple:

Go over to the left, download the Week 9 Spreasheet.  Open it in Excel.  Under the title “Winner” enter the abbreviation for the winning teams in boxes C13:C25.  Go find your name (good luck - we have four full rows) or look for the orange box that pops up under someone’s sheet that says “Winner!”

That’s it.  It should be intuitive and logic driven.  If you type something wrong, close it without saving and start over.  I try to keep it as easy and simplistic as I can; you never know who’s playing and just how out of it they might be!  Speaking of which… who calls in the middle of the rush on a Saturday night, tries me three times and leaves two messages, marks each one as “urgent,” only to ask me to do something that I already had posted on here that I was going to do already?  Reading is fundamental.  Logic is beautiful.  Leaving me a message where you say the same thing SEVEN TIMES and speak at a speed that would bore a sloth to death… well, let’s just say the staff had a nice laugh at that one when I replayed it on speaker!  Should I mention 6 people forgot to pick a game or am I just piling on at that point? 

Thank you to EVERYONE for getting these turned in and playing multiple times for our record pot.  I expect the remainder of the pots to still be respectable but significantly less than this one, especially with next week being due to me by Thursday night.  Wait until you see the little love note on the end of that pick sheet!  I underestimated the lack of literacy the last time I made these things due early - now I know how to nip things in the bud.  Muahahah!

Terrible luck to all of you this week!  Someone is going to win the record pot; I’ve got 10+ chances in there, why not me?!  (It’s been almost 4 years since I won my own damn pool, playing the thing 3-5 times per week!)

I’ll see you back on here tomorrow night with possibilites.

- Steve Pogo

P.S. Dan is in a luxury box for the Pats-Fins game.  If he sends me a picture tomorrow, I’ll post it on here.  Enjoy the game and the trip!  Terrible luck in this pool and even worse luck in our fantasy league (one of nine for me) I’m sick of looking UP at you in the standings!