About

Me

About 18 years ago, I learned about the National Football League and soon thereafter the point spread.1 And a little while after that, I won $40 when Scott Norwood shanked a kick that people still find amusing to this day.

Now, a couple of thousand picks later, it never ceases to fascinate me how this prognostication business can go from glaringly obvious and easy one week, to having your ass handed to you the next. And this applies to everyone — from the dumb-ass neophyte who makes picks based on team mascots, to learned pros who sell their picks for a living — nothing shapes the distribution curve like the point spread. The mascot picker won’t drop below a consistent 35%. And a team of experts with a copy of the Elias stats database and a handful of Cray CX1 computers still can’t consistently hit above 68%.

This Site

Is about wagering — and while there’s a heavy focus on the NFL, well, eventually January is going to come around, and things are going to get slow. So any topic on which someone is willing to speculate odds is up for grabs.

While there are a number of great sites that offer people’s picks, this is not one of them.2 While there will certainly be lots of opinion slung about, the focus is not about my individual picks or performance.

Instead, we’ll look at other peoples picks, thoughts, scams, values, shortcomings, strengths and all the other thousands of intangibles that go into the art of trying to take an unbiased side in a competitive event.

The First-Person Plural

The use of first-person plural predates the modern sports blog. And though a couple of very popular blog authors popularized it recently, I’d feel better pointing out that my use of it is not just to sound pretentious by ripping them off.3

Anyway, the point is this: It is intended to be funny. Maybe many blogs use that voice in order to import a sense of authority.4 And maybe it sounds infantile. But in my case, it’s because I found authors who used it in the past in faux journalistic pieces have done so with pretty good humor value. P.J. O’Rourke and (god help me) Dave Barry come to mind as immediate examples. I’m still convinced I once read something by S.J. Perelman that used it.5 Warming up by reading ten minutes of Zamyatin’s We should help.

For what it’s worth, it’s meant to be the inclusive, not the exclusive we. Currently, there is no one else writing for this site. Other than the voices in our head…

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  1. And far too long after that, some of the finer points of managing the vig. ↩
  2. That is, until I score a short-term run of 72% on college totals or curling or something — then this place is whored out as a tout service whose design will make a free porn site look uncluttered. ↩
  3. I fully expect to sound pretentious for many other reasons than grammatical person. ↩
  4. I dunno — I really only read sports blogs. ↩
  5. Maybe it was P.G. Wodehouse. Or a bad drug bender. It’s kinda been awhile… ↩

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