The Rhinos Wallow

      I missed mentioning last week that after 6 weeks of compitition every franchise in the pool has got their top pick correct at least once. Congratulations to Miss P and Ochocinco for finally getting off the schnied! Well done both of you. I was so happy for you that I drank a glass of wine in your honour. Heck I may even honour you again this week!

      When he received a mention in the EofH this week Beau The Dope wrote to me that he was going to print out and frame the email. Unfortunately for Kneel that is all he will have to remember the week as he needed TBB and ARZ to win to reach the podium.

      D-Man sent in this response late Monday, "Hey:elected not to respond, don’t want to jinx myself lol." Unfortunately, Darin should have waited until the games had ended as he did end up on the outside looking in. It was probably funnier to me than it was to him, and I must admit that he is a nice guy and deserves a better fate.

      I have not be deluged with offers to take over my position. I would remind you that the position is available. There is not actually not all that much work if you do not have to maintain a website. Let me or Doug know if you are interested.

      There have been some problems with the CBS Sports site and their hosting of the pool this season since they revamped and "improved" things. If the pool is to continue possibly it might be worth it to find a site that will host us for a modest fee.

      Apparently Aaron Rogers got snarky with the media after the Jets crashed (again)on Sunday. That makes sense to me. It is a lot easier than looking in the mirror, isn't it. He can say what he wants but things are not going well with the experiment of letting him control the team.

As you know, the Rhino sends out an Email of Hope, listing all the possible money winners with two games left on the schedule. The number of permutations for two games left is 4. Last year, you may recall, a Sunday game got moved to Monday Night (a weather event I think). So the Rhino dutifully sent out the Email of Hope with 3 games left on the schedule. This had an interesting effect on the number of permutations of outcome results. It doubled to 8. So, checking further, this effect holds true for each game you add to the list. For example, 4 games have 16 permutations, 8 games have 32 permutations and so on up to 16 games which has 65,536 permutations. YIKES! No wonder this pool is so hard to win.

Actually, it is not as bad as it sounds. The above is based on each team having an equal chance of winning. But in fact, some teams are better than others. When you are selecting the winners of each game on CBS Sports, you will notice that each team is given a percentage chance of winning its game. In the case of this week, favoured teams are rated at range from 99 percent to 53 percent with an average for the week of 78 percent. The favoured team percentage would drop the number permutations to just under 15,000. Still pretty hard to win this pool. So with all that said, congratulations to all the of Magnificent Seven who were perfect last week.

The Email of Hope

After 7 weeks of play, D Man is in 1st place, having received 7 emails, Sassychassis, Chainman and Ben Naaykens are tied for 2rd with 6 emails each.

For those of you who wish to see the Email of Hope standings, please click here. Note: the winning dollar amounts are a week behind as the winners are not known at time of writing.

Until next week,
Ungawa,
The Rotters

The Monica Award - Shifty, Knows Picker and Beau The Dope get to share the joy of ending up only 1 point from the prize pool. Oh, yeah, there is no joy in that is there?

    The POW Award - This week's POW award goes to the 6 franchises that picked Seattle to upset the Falcons. This week we salute Genomania, Knows Picker, Mich Fits, Murrman, Sassy Chassis and Trevor Posch who made a lot of points vs the rest of the pool with this pick. Well done all of you!

    The Celler Dweller - 39 franchises earned at least 100 points this week and Mustard Man managed to amass 69 points. I don't want to hurt his feelings by saying that this is pretty dismal so I will just quit now. Well, I might add that it is a bit feeble. Maybe I should also point out that this was a lame effort and it must be depressing to have such a horrid week.

   Without further ado, this weeks winners, and we honour and congratulate them are....

1st (T) Murrman - Sean wrote in, "What a sweat lol" Isn't that the truth. The last play of the last game, with time expired by the time the ball went through the uprights decided his fate. As Aaron Rogers would say, "Relax" - easier said than done! -

1st (T)Ben Naaykens - Ben does not respond to emails - he just collects winnings -

3rd Ochocinco - The first winnings of the season for Ochocinco. Don't forget that he won the pool in 2022. -

4th (T) Wyatt Bray - The first winnings for Wyatt. Not a great haul but enough to eliminate any Tin Cup fears.

4th (T) The Holey One - John also started his seasonal winnings slowly. It does relax you a bit after Tin Cup pressure is off.

     My thought for this week, "Anyone who says their wedding was the best day of their life has clearly never had two candy bars fall-down at once from a vending machine. "