Ok, everybody! This season's college football bowl pool files are now ready!
Some noteworthy items:
- I'm again not waiting until after the Army-Navy game, so I don't know Army's final record, so I've simply listed them as "Army (10-2 or 9-3)". I've found this to be simpler than leaving that cell unprotected, allowing you to edit it, and then dealing with the possibility that you do that AFTER picks are entered and thereby cause the picks for those game to no longer match.
- The bowl line-up is essentially the same as last year -- no new bowls and no eliminated bowls.
- We do have three sponsor/name changes: The Zaxby's Heart of Dallas Bowl is now the Servepro First Responder Bowl. The Motel 6 Cactus Bowl is now the Cheez-It Bowl. And the Foster Farms Bowl has become the Redbox Bowl. You can just feel the tradition building with those...
- This year, in addition to including the teams' records, I've included their rankings (for those in the top 25).
- I've updated the sheets with opening betting lines for your convenience, but you should probably update these as we get closer to the games. I use the "VI Consensus" lines from Vegas Insider.
- Finally, I did choose to keep the FCS-level Celebration Bowl as part of the line-up. Feel free to have your participants make picks for that game or not, as you like. It ends up being an exciting game, at least.
For those unfamiliar with the two-file system, the idea is that pool managers can distribute the simple, single person Entry Form version to those in their pool to make their picks and assign confidence points. The participants them email back that file, and the manager can simply copy, paste special... values those picks and points into the Summary file, which is where they manage everything.
As always, the file is protected, but not with a password, so feel free to unprotect the workbook and then unhide some of the sheets running this stuff behind the scenes to see how it works. And if you add some cool hacks/additions, pass them along, so we can all enjoy them.
Finally, as also always happens each year, several folks, as they were pinging, pestering, checking-in with me offered to pay me or donate to me for the sheets. This, like the NFL pick 'em sheet I do, I do for free as a labor of love. That said, if you are so compelled, feel free to PayPal me whatever you like:
$5.00 $10.00 $25.00 $50.00
Really you just have to change that dollar amount in the URL -- https://paypal.me/excelgeek/5.
Enjoy, everyone!
