...flip your What the Heck (TM) picks. You'd be in the top 10 then if I'm remembering your results correctly. It does seem slightly unfair to yourself to judge your picks on the same scale as everyone else when you're basically conceding 16 games.

Not sure if we are interpreting these results properly. The farther you go out on the bell curve, the more deviance from the norm. Seems to me the one closest to the mean should be the winner. The objective should be to pick an identical number of winners and losers, which is not that easy. There is a Keno game in Vegas where you try to pick numbers which aren't selected. Same problem as winning. We all heard about the kid who got all the questions on his SAT wrong. Hard to do, the kid was a genius. Seems to me that picking an equal number of winners and losers indicates you have perfectly gamed the system?

I find it highly suspicious that 2 career mediocrities suddenly turn it around in 1 season. Sure, sure, better workout program, nutrition, blah blah. Clearly a drug screening program is required here. These sorts of things make travesties of the history of PoE. How long before we see a 200 pick season? Or 225? Action is required. Where is the Congressional oversight?

I'm sure you see my point, even if I don't have one.

If I didn't post this same thing here last year, I do at least remember thinking at this time last year:

Time to retire the What the Heck pick each week. Why intentionally cripple yourself in the competition among the 'experts'?

Love your column, always have, probably always will.... but that's just one nitpick I have, the What the Heck pick is played out, ditch it now.

Just flip a coin, removing the "favorites" restrictions King puts on Daisy's picks.

You should get very close to half the games right.

Someone could dig through the archives and find this out, but I think the first season King Kaufman tried the coin flip gimmick with a much younger Buster, he didn't have the constraints. I can't remember if he came close to the 50-50 split though.

What happens if you just follow a simple rule, like always picking the team with the most wins (flipping a coin if they're even)?

While your point is entirely reasonable and a likely start to a good and effective hack, you are missing a very basic principal: football is controlled by the gods, in the real world, and what we are looking for is oracles that can interpret the Will of the Football Gods for us, not effective algorithms.

Prayer and mysticism is what we are after, not cold hard logic. Cold hard and effective logic would make it all so very boring, and non-debatable, and what the hell is the fun of being a fan if you can't engage in obscure debates over the minutiae in a particular set of statistics about a particular position's performance? Oh, oops, that was baseball.

One of the very best things about football is that it is inherently an attempt to impose order on chaos, and chaos on order. Both offense and defense attempt this, in various ways and places, but very literally and obviously. It is the charm of the game.

Hey King,

I hope you don't think this is faint praise, because it's not, I'm totally serious: I probably started reading your column regularly to hear about Buster and the coin flips and I still enjoy the gimmick. It's funny and it makes a larger, more serious point, which is what the best of your columns do. Keep it up!