Well, sports fans, we’ve all experienced that crushing feeling of being grabbed by the ankles with our fingers, claw-like, dug into the hard-packed dirt, screaming at the top of our lungs while being dragged towards a situation we just knew, without a doubt, that we had managed to avoid.
But, alas, this situation was inevitable. The end of the 2024 college football regular season is fast approaching and it’s almost time to kick off the 13th iteration of the SBBPA…WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!
And what a season this promises to be! In response to the significant changes implemented by ESPN and the Sports Betting Industry the NCAA and with the migration to the 12-team playoff, the SBBPA Board of Directors have implemented several changes to the format of the competition. And while we’re confident that the process implemented by the Board was a sound one, we have no bloody idea whether these changes are going to work…AT ALL!
So…what’s the SBBPA going to look like this year? There will be TWO DIVISIONS:
The VEGAS Division
The CHAMPIONS Division
The VEGAS Division (non-playoff games)
Remember, back in last year’s competition when we said this:
Now…we can promise you, the esteemed SBBPA, that doing the right thing still matters here. Winning still matters here. We will not arbitrarily demote your picks because, well, they don’t look good to us. If you win, we won’t decide that we’d rather not exclude someone else and discard your body of work over the course of the challenge so we can give out a glorified participation trophy. Your excellence will not be disappeared.
OK…we really did mean that. BUT…in a classic case of “if you can’t beat them, join them” logic, we have “relaxed” this maxim somewhat in this round. Winning still matters, but only if the victory is impressive enough! For the non-playoff games, prognosticators will pick the winners for each game. However, to win the point, the winning team MUST COVER the spread assigned at the beginning of the challenge. If the winning team does NOT COVER, any player who selected the losing team will get the point! Or, if a player picks the underdog, and they win, that player gets the point.
Why are we doing this? Boredom. Most of the non-playoff games will not be interesting and, let’s face it, are mostly meaningless. HOWEVER, using the spread means that the outcome is important…that the play on the field is important. How these games unfold may actually be interesting! So how does this work? Here’s a contemporary example:
Florida State (-24.5)
Charleston Southern (+24.5)
The numbers in the parenthesis is the spread. FSU is favored to win by a margin of 24.5 points over Charleston Southern. If a player picks FSU to win, they’ll get the point if FSU wins by MORE than 24.5 points. If a player picks Charleston Southern in a bet that FSU will not cover the spread (a good bet) and FSU wins by less than 24.5 points (or Charleston Southern wins the game), the player who picked the losing team will win the point as FSU’s win wasn’t impressive enough. That seems fair, RIGHT!? In this round, you’re picking performance, the team that will meet or exceed expectations.
Sometimes the spread will be an EVEN NUMBER like: Florida State (-21), Charleston Southern (+21). In this case, if FSU wins by exactly 21 points, this is a PUSH, and neither player gets a point. If FSU wins by 24, the player who picked them gets the point. If FSU wins by 14 points, the brilliant player who picked Charleston Southern will get the point. Got it?
The Champions Division (playoff games)
Points earned in the Vegas Division are carried forward to the Champions Division. In this division, there is no spread, no Over/Under challenge. Players will simply pick the winner of EVERY playoff game for the entire playoff bracket. This means that those Round 1 picks are extremely important as the winners advance to the quarterfinal round. Miss a few picks in the first round and your bracket could be blown! Point awards for each round are weighted:
Round 1 = 1 point
Round 2 (quarterfinals) = 2 points
Round 3 (semifinals) = 4 points
Round 4 (championship) = 8 points
Points will be totaled at the end and the player with the most points will win.
In this version of the SBBPA, it’s entirely possible that a player could not do well during the first part of the challenge and then storm back to win it all. And, conversely, a player could pick a lot of winners and STILL lose. Such is life. And as the great footballer Danny Rojas said:
FOOTBALL IS LIFE!
Stay tuned for the next post, which will include a link to the 13th Annual SBBPA Bowl Pick’em Form. Let’s get ready to RUUUUMBLE!
Brilliant!! Perfectly clear!! (Posting for a friend)