Two-Week Survivor ("TWS") is like BFIG on steroids, with at least a 33 percent chance you'll consider picking an AFC South team to win a football game. READ THIS POST, then click the link at the bottom to join and make your picks.
STEP 1: UNDERSTAND THE RULES
- Just like BFIG, you pick teams to win their games, and you can only pick each team once. So simple your football-loving grandma can play.
- But TWS only lasts, wait for it... two weeks. Surprise! You pick FIVE games per week.
- You must pick one game from EACH of the five weekly time slots: Thursday, Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, Sunday night, and Monday. This maximizes unity, camaraderie, simultaneous BLL consumption, fascinating strategic considerations, AND the probability you'll ask yourself a question like, "Jags or Titans?"
- Primetime Exception: If you absolutely cannot avoid picking one team's game twice (e.g. they play on SNF then on MNF the following week), you can pick them twice.
- You must win all five games in the first week to advance to the second week.
- If only one brave soul finishes a perfect 10-0, they are clearly the champ. In the case no one finishes 10-0, or multiple people survive the TWS gauntlet, we move to tiebreakers (see step 3).
STEP 2: TWO THINGS YOU *MUST* DO WHEN SUBMITTING PICKS
First, you need one pick from each of the five timeslots. Your final pick line should look similar to this:
Second, you must include your tiebreakers in the comment field. Rank your picks by confidence ranking ("CR") - 1 (most confident) to 5 (least) - and also include an exact score prediction for ONE of your picks. (You can then write a standard take, if you wish!) It should look like this:
Commish and GM will make this more streamlined in the near future. For now, I have the utmost faith you'll do it right.
STEP 3: THINK ABOUT HOW TIEBREAKERS MIGHT AFFECT YOUR STRATEGY
Tiebreaker 1: Overall record. If you go 9-1 and everyone else is 8-2 or worse, you win.
Tiebreaker 2: Timing of first loss. In true survival fashion, if two people go 9-1, the person whose loss came later wins. Keep this in mind when making your first week picks - you can't use those teams the following week!
Tiebreaker 3: Confidence ranking. You assign a distinct number, 1-5, to each pick. "1" is your most confident pick, and "5" is your least confident pick. If necessary, the person with the lowest confidence ranking first loss wins. (E.g. Your CR-3 team lost, while my CR-2 team lost; that makes you the champ.)
Tiebreaker 4 (lol): You predict the final score of one of your games. Whoever is closest to the actual score wins. No damn ties.
STEP 4: JOIN THE COMPETITION, THEN SHIMMY JUST A LITTLE - YOU'RE BACK PICKING AGAIN
We'll be doing three TWS competitions this year. The reason this one is called "Two-Week Survivor II" is we did an inaugural trial run last year. A bunch of people went 5-0 in the first week, then the best record anyone compiled in the second week was 3-2. That's the NFL for you. Feel free to lol at the spreadsheet used to run TWS last year.
Shoot any questions our way - yo@theszn.com - and get some friends in for the NFL stretch run!