Real football starts tonight

Though my team, the Gophers, suck ,I have a penchant for college football. It all started on a Saturday this fall when my new-born-son woke me up at 5AM. From that day on, we'd head downstairs where I'd read the paper then watch College Gameday with Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit and Lee Corso. Good family fun for everyone.

Anyway as you can imagine I'm excited for bowl season. It's almost better than the NFL Playoffs for me. Every year I participate in a fun raising pool for a baseball team I used to play on. Last year I finished in the top 25 out of 200 or so people. Only the top five positions paid, but I won a side bet and thus felt good about myself.

The pool works like this. First you pick all the winners. Then as a tie breaker you enter what you think the total score for all 32 games will be. I took a basic statistical approach.

First of all I added up all the over/under numbers from a sports website that has listings from Covers.com. Covers is the sports website with the headline "sports with a Vegas edge." Nice!

After I got all the scores added up, I took the mean which gave me 59.125. Then got the median which is 59.75. I took the average of those two to get 59.4375. Multiply that by 32 games and you get 1902. I actually went a bit below that and entered a score of 1888. Consider the four less points my non-quantitative contribution.

So if you're in a pool and need to enter the combined score of all 32 games, feel free to use my numbers or method.