The Triumphant Return of the Big Ten Pick 'em Game: Week 1

For those who have been posting on the IB for a while, you might remember I tried to do this a few seasons ago. Basic premise, you try and guess the final margin of victory for a game, and you get points based on how close you are. Whoever has the most points at the end of the year wins..... nothing, but hopefully it will be fun along the way.

Here's how the scoring will work: Each game is worth 25 points.

- 10 points for correctly picking the winning team
- up to 10 points for correctly picking the margin of victory.
- 5 bonus points if you pick the margin of mictory on the nose (example, you pick Illinois to win by 7 and Illinois wins by exactly 7)
- For each game you can chose for a team to win by "more than 20 points". By doing this you are predicting a BLOWOUT. Different scoring rules apply if you select this option. If the team you select to win by a blowout wins by 21 or more points, then you receive 10 points for correctly picking the winning team, 10 points for Margin of Victory (regardless of the actual margin), and 5 bonus points for correctly selecting a blowout. If you select a team to win by blowout, and they win by 1-19 points, then you will only receive the 10 points for selecting the winning team, regardless of what the margin of victory is. IF YOU CHOSE A TEAM TO WIN BY BLOWOUT, AND THEY LOSE THE GAME... not only will I laugh at you, but you will LOSE 5 points from your total score (henceforth known as the "Appalachian State Rule")... so be careful.


Also, each week there will be a bonus question, and bonus points will be given to those with the top scores each week. Each week you will get up to 25 points for how well you judged the fate of each Big Ten team (this means that Big Ten Conference games are worth double), plus 25 points for a bonus game. If any Big Ten team has a bye, then another game will be selected.

That means each week you can get:

up to 300 points guessing the score of games
up to 40 points for how you fared in THAT week.
up to 10 points for a bonus question.

For a total of 350 points.

Over the 13 week football season, that is a maximum total of 4,550 points.

Good luck.