Our 2012 winner is Justin Lammert, who collects $4,400 for his effort. The entire top 10 is shown below:
1. Justin Lammert ($4,400)
2. Ryan Hamlin ($1,408)
3. Ashley Vitale ($1,056)
4. Jim Ball ($528)
5.(tie) Miles Schlosser ($396)
5.(tie) Jay Gilbaugh ($396)
7.(tie) Dan Bowman ($220)
7.(tie) Derek Lynn ($220)
9.(tie) Ed Kirby ($88)
9.(tie) Julia Hartvigson ($88)
Here's what I find interesting every single year. Justin won with 517 points. A very good score, indeed. But there's room for someone to have dominated his outstanding picks. The optimal score this year would have been 627 points, with 12 teams with combined seeding of 86. The optimal 12 teams this year were:
1 Kentucky 128 points
2 Kansas 82 points
4 Louisville 69 points
2 Ohio State 58 points
11 NC State 48 points
7 Florida 48 points
13 Ohio 45 points
10 Xavier 33 points
6 Cincinnati 33 points
15 Lehigh 30 points
3 Baylor 29 points
12 S. Florida 24 points
We're looking forward to next year and we'll have the payment system automated again. This year we had about 30 players fail to actually send in their payments. I am only disqualifying 5 of those who expressly told me they would not be paying. They will be banned from playing again. The rest of you who have not paid will receive emails in the coming days and I hope you will indeed pay because I am going to pay out to our winners as if you have all paid. We are, once again, taking a risk on your honesty for the sake of the pool's credibility. We did not want to keep reducing the number of players because it might have looked like something was up. So, if you get an email from me, please pay promptly.
Finally, we're toying with a new pool idea that would be put up on this site in October 2012. It is a pre-March Madness pool predicting the tournament field. It is the brain child of Preston Donion and we'd call it the Preston Pool. Effectively, you choose any 12 teams from all of NCAA basketball. When the tournament seedings are announced, we would compile the total of the seed numbers for your 12 teams. The highest total wins. Thus, you're pulling for teams that barely make it into the NCAA tournament rather than teams like Kentucky and Kansas. It gives you some random teams to root for all season long. Again, look to this site near the beginning of the basketball season in the Fall.
Thanks as always for playing this pool with us.
Steve and Scott Kelley
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