NFL Survivor Pool

Thanksgiving 2008 = NFL blowouts

The combined score of the three turkey games were 129-39. But at least all y’all were imbibing, right?

15 of the 20 players left picked either the Titans or Cowboys, so most of us are surviving another week.

It’s also looking more and more like we’re going to have a split pot again this year. In 2005, the only other time that it has happened in seven years, there were ten players going into week 13, and we have 20 this year. Maybe next year, I’ll come up with a way of taking the pool into the playoffs.

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Because of the long Thanksgiving weekend and there being three games on Thursday, all picks are due by Thursday at 10am.

I’ll do the week 12 recap when I have time; I’ve been too busy so far this week. It’s a short week!

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This week was the first time that an NFL tie has affected the pool. As I had previously mentioned, the last time the NFL had a tie was in 2002, the first year I ran this pool. However, when it happened in week 10 of 2002, noone picked either team so it didn’t mean anything but did prompt me to clarify the rule around picking a winning team.

Anyhow, we’re down to 26.

Again there wasn’t a clear-cut favorite team this week, seeing how 32 players picked 9 different teams. Probably a little anxious for some who picked the Colts, Dolphins or Panthers. They all trailed in their games at some point. Colts were down 13-9 to the Texans at the half. Raiders were leading the Dolphins 15-14 with less than a minute to go. Panthers were down more than halfway through the second quarter.

If you want to pick in the Thursday night game, I must have your pick by Thursday at 5pm. Otherwise, all other picks due Sunday at 10am.

A reminder for next week: Because it’s Thanksgiving, ALL PICKS for Week 13 are due Thursday morning at 10am.

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Quick note about the Eagles-Bengals game that ended in a tie. The last time the NFL saw a tie game was in 2002, the first year I ran my pool.

As clearly stated in the rules, the goal each week is to pick a team to win their game, not to tie their game. The tie counts as a loss.

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See, I knew you were quick! You noticed the new site design right away, didn’t you?

So I busted my butt the last couple of nights to get the design finished up and polished off a few browser quirks, and everything is now live.

The site is best viewed using Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome. If you are using Internet Explorer, I had to dummy down some of the design since various versions of IE didn’t support certain things (even the latest version of IE still doesn’t). The biggest difference you might notice is the calendar badge used by the blog entries is completely different and boring in IE 6.

If you’re still using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you really should switch to Firefox. It’s a better, more secure, less buggy, and just plain faster browser. You’ll notice the speed differences almost immediately. Ask anyone who uses it if you don’t trust your commish.

A few things I learned along the way:

• Firefox is still by far the best browser available in 2008. Safari and Chrome come in a close second. (Not too surprising since they are based on the same engine.) If you’re still using Internet Explorer, you’re still stuck in 1999. There’s a good reason that IE’s market share is dwindling.
• Firefox, Safari and Chrome all supported the latest technologies that I utilized, including alpha transparency in PNGs (think transparent GIFs x 1000).  IE 7 kinda supports them but not fully, and IE 6 just sucks at it. That’s why I had to dummy down the fancy calendar badge. I also had to dummy down the schedule pop-ups cuz IE 7 has a PNG bug in it, but that’s not as noticeable.
• Firefox, Safari and Chrome all have fast javascript engines, which means all of my jQuery code runs fast. IE any version certainly does not, especially the easing animation in my navigation bar—it appears to jump and stutter. I also used jQuery for the hide/show option of eliminated players on the front page (new feature).
• IE 6 has a bug in it, where background images aren’t cached. Since I heavily used background images to make the site pretty, it would download the same image hundreds of times. Bad IE. I found a clunky fix for it, but it still may not work for everyone.
• CSS sprites are fun and are heavily utilized to reduce the number of images that needed to be downloaded. Haven’t used sprites since the early ’90s in the days of ANSI being pretty. Old is new again.

If you encounter any issues, let me know. I wasn’t able to test the design with every possible browser scenario.

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