Hi! Did you remember we had an Official Off Tackle Empire Bowl Pick’em Challenge?
Me neither.
But there’s just one game left—the College Football Playoff National Championship—and it will decide the winner of both our Straight-Up and Confidence pick pools!
Straight-Up:
The Leader: Something called theShizzNizz is out in front, guaranteed no worse than a tie for the title (I haven’t decided on if/how I’ll use tiebreakers), and an outright crown if they can correctly guess the winner of the title game.
The Challengers: A bevy of folks with 29 points are chasing theShizzNizz—including our own Dead Read. Any of them, with a correct title guess and a misstep by tSN, would share in the honor of a championship.
How’d you do, MNW? I don’t want to talk about it.
Confidence Picks
The Leader: MG Blaze, with the disgustingly-named Row the Boat! pick-set, leads the pack by a wide margin, actually slotting in the Top 1% of all ESPN pickers. Good work, MG Blaze!
The Challenger: Yes, singular! One one participant can catch MG Blaze, at this point—it’s sixth-place collinsutrick, whose self-titled entry has 31 points riding on the final game! Collin (who has 663 points and 31 points riding) needs to get the NCG correct and have MG Blaze (693 points) mess up. Collin would win by exactly one point.
The drama. The intrigue.
How’d you do, MNW? Pretty well! A couple last-minute changes have really boosted my performance—I’m just cut off by this screengrab, sitting in 19th at 601 with 17 riding on the title game. My only bad miss was expecting Utah State to roll over Kent State in the Tropical Smoothie Bowl—I lost my 41-pointer on the Golden Flashes’ historic upset.
In other OTE/SBN regular news, Thump sits 15 points behind me, with regular commenters Viceroy Fizzlebottom (656 pts, 9th), Illegal Use of Hands (611 pts, 13th), and chitownhawkeye (604 pts, T-14th) above me.
One of my favorite parts about this is some of the random usernames we’ll get in here. It’s a fun reminder of just how many of you—not only regular commenters, but readers or followers on social media—make OTE a source for Big Ten football community. Thank you all for reading, and check back soon for the winners to be announced and offered their “prize”.
In the meantime, hit the comments and let us know how your picks fared!