Picking football winners this year can give you a Mac-headache

Man, it’s not easy picking winners in football this year. It’s not easy in any pool, contest or at any level.

The days of the traditional powers being sure bets, er, picks, in college or pro ball are gone, or at least they’re rapidly shifting. The challenge used to be trying to figure out the middle of the pack and also-ran teams.

When it comes to the NFL, I’ve found CBSSports.com columnist Pete Prisco’s Power Rankings Tuesday morning to be fairly reliable, at least in the past. This year, team’s are moving up and down his rankings so much, and often by a lot of spaces, that trying to keep up can cause you to fall out of your chair because of vertigo.

And then there’s college ball. Who’d have figured Arizona would go into Eugene and knock off Oregon, or Ole Miss would have first upended perennial national title contender Alabama and then followed that with a road win at Texas A&M?

I guess parity has come to football. Or we’re just in a trough, and soon we’ll be able to rely on new, perennial powers for security in our picks.

So until that time in which security, if not sanity, is restored, I’ve resorted to other methods to prognosticate for Cheney Free Press readers and in my other pools. All of which are done just for fun, you know.

With regards to our football contest, we “experts” are at a disadvantage. True, we have the same timeframe in which to make our picks, but we don’t have the advantage of being able to read injury reports, and in some cases, arrest reports from schools in the larger FBS conferences.

Add in a good degree of parity, and it’s a crapshoot pretty much. My method now is waiting until Tuesday morning, pouring myself a cup of coffee, sitting down at my dining room table and holding the piece of paper with the weekly picks on it to my forehead, ala Johnny Carson’s Karnak the Magnificent.

Call me “Mac-Karnak, the not so Magnificent but hopefully Inspired.” Or lucky. Even divine. OK, maybe not.

I do use some science. If I don’t have a gut feeling, or my gut feeling is queasiness, nausea and a sudden need to feed the Steven A. Smith Little Voice in My Stomach, I’ll do a little research.

I’ll hit ESPN.com, look up the teams, check out their rankings in passing and rushing yards, along with points for and points against, add those four numbers, divide by the day’s date, times that number by the number of days until the bowl season begins, take the average of that number and the starting number and then subtract 100 and compare results.

Why 100? Why not, it’s just as good as any other number. And, I no longer have a dartboard.

If that doesn’t work, dice do. Besides, I’ve never been one to select a team by the color of their uniforms, their mascot, or how cute their quarterback is.

Especially the latter.

So, until order is restored and there are teams I can count on week in and week out to win say 80 percent of the time, I’ll just have to use whatever system I can devise.

If you have a better one, let me know.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].