More Free Picks and The Start of the Free Weekly Game Picking Contest (how you can play)

By Mitch • October 18th, 2008

As everyone knows, you can get even more picks and analysis by signing up for my free newsletter, now you get even more.

Starting Saturday October 25th, I will be hosting a free game picking contest. While I announced the contest a few weeks ago and there has been a lot of interest I wanted to fill you in more as to how it’s going to work since it’s right upon us. For those of you who just want the newsletter or just wanted your free copy of my ebook/report: Betting On College Football Made Simple, there’s no obligation to enter, you’ll still get your additional free picks every week as you always have.

This will be our first ever picking contest. It’s fun, free, and all that you need to do is be a subscriber to my free newsletter and you will be eligible to enter. If you have friends that want to enter they will have to subscribe to the newsletter on their own, multiple entries off of the same email address will not be accepted and if it is an email that doesn’t match up to my newsletter mailing list the entry will be voided. Signing up for the newsletter takes about 20 seconds and you will be emailed a verification that you signed up. If you don’t receive the verification that means either you aren’t registered correctly but more than likely it’s in your SPAM filter. Speaking of SPAM, I will never SPAM you or sell or share your information to anyone. I don’t like SPAM either nor telemarketing calls for that matter.

I’ll be sending out the games, point spreads, and rules by Tuesday night but if you’ve signed up for the newsletter later than that you can still enter right up until the cut off time. I’ll give you just a quick run down of how it is going to work. I’ll send everything out using the same list I use for the newsletter and basically it’s going to have about 25 games listed. From those 25 games you’ll have to pick 20 of them and rank your predicted winner against the spread with a confidence level from 1-20. The other 5 games you don’t want to use will be left out. It’s pretty simple, whomever has the highest point total wins. I doubt it will come to this but I will have a tie-breaker based on 1 game picking the winner against the spread and the point total of the winning team. Like I said I’ll mail out the rules with the games and odds but this seems pretty fair to me and should create enough separation that we’ll probably never need the tie-breaker (now that I wrote that we’ll need it every week). As the weeks go on we can adjust the number of games by the amount of the projected weekly participants, more people means more games that have to be picked (can you tell I don’t like tie-breakers?)

Picks and point values will need to be submitted back to my by email by 11:40 EST on Saturday. Everyone’s picks and point values will be posted in a chart format in the forum around kickoff of the first game on Saturday. If you don’t want your name to be used make sure you include a nick name and those who have their own blog, website, or other distribution network are encouraged to use their url or other needed info as their entry name (fair enough?, be tasteful please, this is a family site). I will email the forum password with the entry form and we’ll have some separate threads just relating to the contest where you can trash talk, ask questions regarding the rules, etc.

Like I said I will email these rules out again and hopefully clarify some of the details as well. Good luck to everyone and I encourage you to tell your friends or anyone else whom you think would enjoy being a part of it, it should be a lot of fun and my guess is it will be growing all season long. If it is as successful as I hope it will be we will have a contest for the bowls and a cumulative as well as weekly contest is already in the plans for next season. As always, if you have any questions most of you already know I’m pretty easy to get in touch with and I try my best to get back to everyone as quickly as I can.

Before I forget, there will be prizes, usually a gift card from one of my sponsors. For the first week the prize will be a choice of a gift card from Foot Locker or iTunes. As the contest grows I’ll add lower prizes for second and third place but since is the first one and I’m not even sure how many people are going to enter so let’s just make it winner take all. I have a lot of newsletter subscribers but I never have asked if they were going to participate, I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

In any event this should be a lot of fun and we will see once and for all who the best pickers really are when they don’t have the opportunity to cherry pick around every game. Best of luck to everyone and I’m as excited to see the results as anyone.