The days are quickly dwindling until B1G football will be upon us once again! That can mean only one thing here in the Fanpost section of OTE: the return of B1G Survivor. Itś hard to believe that weŕe already up to year five of this little game!

When Survivor was last heard from, we were celebrating the victory by Nick Leivers in an especially brutal year for the contestants. It took us only five weeks to go from 76 initial entrants down to a single survivor.

The rules for the game are pretty simple, and follow most standard Survivor/Eliminator pools. You pick one B1G team each week. If that team wins, you move on to the next week, but cannot pick that team again for the rest of the season. If your pick loses, youŕe out. Since there are 14 weeks in the B1G season (including championship week), you´ll have to reserve Ohio St your presumed champion for week 14 if you wish to complete a perfect season.

If all remaining players get eliminated the same week, the tiebreaker rules are as follows (same as previous years):

1. Best combined winning %age of B1G teams you haven´t used

2. Strength of Victory (non FBS teams´ records get converted to 0-for)

3. Whomever got their losing pick in first

The one rule we added last year was that you can only pick against a specific team twice. This year, I´m thinking that might be a little too restrictive, so we´ll up it to a maximum of three picks against whoever the bottom feeders turn out to be.

Here is the Week 0/1 Schedule. All games are Saturday, September 4th unless otherwise noted:

Nebraska @ Illinois (Saturday 8/28)

Temple Owls @ Rutgers (Thursday 9/2)

Ohio State @ Minnesota Golden Gophers (Thursday 9/2)

Michigan State @ Northwestern (Friday 9/3)

Penn State @ Wisconsin

Western Michigan @ Michigan

Fordham @ Nebraska

Indiana @ Iowa

West Virginia @ Maryland

Oregon State @ Purdue

UTSA @ Illinois

All picks for Week 0/1 are due Saturday 9/4 at 11AM Central, or prior to kickoff of your pick´s game--whichever comes first. Also, no latecomers will be allowed this year. You snooze, you lose.

I included the Week 0 matchup of Bert and Frosty for Week 1, although I´m not quite sure why anyone would actually want to pick that game. If that game is really calling your name, please specify ¨Illinois over Nebraska¨ or ¨Nebraska over Illinois¨. If I only see ¨Illinois¨ or ¨Nebraska¨, I will assume you´re picking that team against their Week 1 opponent.

Best of luck to all that participate! My Week 1 pick: The Illinois Fighting Illini