Thursday Night Pick: Popping a cherry

So we're back to that part of the NFL season where there's a game on Thursday nights and my usual plan of waiting until late Saturday night/early Sunday morning to finalize my picks will have to change. Considering this is the first year that the one group is using the PoolHost site for that particular confidence pool, this week is going to be test run for whether I'm allowed to alter my picks after submitting them in a moment after I post this. That said, I will still be waiting until later this weekend to post my remaining picks for the weekend's slate of games, but in the meantime, I'm forced to submit my first prediction for Week 10.

The saving grace here is that tonight's game features a pretty even matchup, so while I'm waiting to see how many people might fail to submit a pick, how (or even if) they'll be penalized, and whether I'll be able to modify the rest of my picks, I think that it works out well for this first time through with my Thursday pick only being for a single point. At worst, I'll suffer the most minimal damage possible and wouldn't lose any ground to those who fail to submit picks if the site—as I fear it might—simply allows users to submit the rest of their picks and only deprives them of their one-point bets instead of, say, maximum damage by costing them 14 points as the administrator of the pool used to do in seasons past.

So let's get Week 10 rolling:

1 point

Baltimore Ravens (6-2) over Atlanta Falcons (6-2)

+44/-4 : +44/5/+39 : +43/0

Again, this could have been worse had this week's game been a game I'd wanted to place more in the middle of my picks or even a heavily-favored team that suffered an upset. So I've got nothing to be angry about ... yet.

NOTE: It appears most people have their picks in, so maybe all of this worrying about how others would get away with minimal damage was really for naught.