After seeing some suggestions I've got a general plan. I've posted it in one diary, but wanted to bring it to the front page. I also want to discuss the idea of prizes and trying to come up with some ideas.
Up to this point we've had 23 different people make predictions either over the course of the entire season or at given points in the season. For the NFL playoffs, we're going to have 2 separate contests. The first contest will take the top 8 people in the regular season prediction game and have them compete against each other. There are two options for this and I'd like to hear what people think about both. One option is take the 8 teams, everybody makes their picks wildcard weekend and the top 4 advance (tiebreaker would be how you did during the regular season predictions). The other option that intrigues me is taking the 8 and seeding them based on regular season results. Each person would make their predictions and whoever does better advances to the next weekend. So based on present standings, sfgfan would face rimrock101 in the 1-8 matchup, marcello would face HowTheyScored in the 2-7 matchup and so forth.
So first I'd like to hear people's thoughts on those two options and which you like better (and if you haven't made predictions up to this point you're certainly welcome to make your thoughts known on the playoff system. However we do it though, we'd have a winner in the end and I'll discuss the prize issue below).
The second contest will be for everybody who wants to take part (including people in the playoff). It'll go like the regular season contest, except we'll be picking playoff games (obviously). At the end of the playoffs we'll have a winner from that.
Winners & Prizes
The plan then is to have the playoff winner, the general postseason prediction contest winner and then the overall regular season winner. As I mentioned in the beginning, I was thinking the prize for now would be the opportunity for a front page post on a topic of your choice. I'll want to hear your plan for the post first, but all I would disallow is a bunch of swearing, any sort of hate speech and what would generally come across as truly distasteful to the reasonable person.
So if we have 3 different winners, each of you would get the front page post.
Going forward though, I wanted to throw something out to everybody in the community. I'd love to be able to give out actual prizes for the contests that might be run from time to time. How would we get these prizes? Well I wanted to hear from anybody who might have access to potential free prizes they can get access to. For instance, I have a friend who knows a guy at EA Sports who might be able to get a free copy of Madden. Maybe you know somebody who can hook you up with a gift certificate to a restaurant in the Bay Area (or a chain restaurant for those outside the Bay Area). Basically, I'm not looking for people to spend money, but rather try and utilize your resources to come up with the always nice free stuff. That way we could provide a little extra motivation to take part in predictions and whatnot.
So have it and let me know what you think.