Clutching to my lead in the football pool

Okay I'm just going to vomit this and afterwards, I'm sure I'll feel all better. After 14 weeks, I'm currently leading in the overall in my football pool but I'm kind of feeling the heat. Now I know how Georges St. Pierre must feel with a new contender every few months:


But if you notice, there are some folks who missed a week or two, including the thorn who, despite spacing out on the cutoff time to make picks one week and earned a fat egg for that week, is still in 2nd place.

So is this a clearer picture of how this pool is going?


When looking at averages, I'm sandwiched between people who have missed one or two weeks and have better averages than those of us who have played every single week. We can only imagine what their scores would be if didn't miss those weeks. Now you don't have to tell me that who ever gets highest total is still the winner--after all, if you sleep through the high jump, they don't award you the gold in the decathlon by averaging your scores in all the other events you did participate in. But it still kind of bugs me and I'm gunning to top the averages as well. So I keep overthinking and overanalyzing the games. Unfortunately, it has not paid off, as I only got half right the past two weeks. My personal weakness has been the Detroit Lions and the week I decide to go all business, the Green Bay QB gets a concussion and the Packers aren't able to get a TD, and the Lions WIN. [Side note: I will almost-gladly take the loss if it meant a W for Detroit. Go Lions.]

Take tonight's game, San Diego over San Francisco by 9: the sentimental part of me says San Francisco will have a real confidence boost from their big win over Seattle and yeesh if they don't win, are they going to lose by 9?! But the business part of me responds with: Are you kidding? SF and Seattle are both in the worst division where SF doesn't even necessarily need a win tonight to win their sad division. Also SF has been crappy on the road and SD is pretty golden at home. Plus if you think SF had a good week last week, that's like Philip Rivers' average week. Then deus-ex-machina me says, but what if THIS is the turning point for SF? AND, sad to say, Rivers has been escaping the general odds, as a first string QB, of avoiding injury...so far. I went with San Diego, FWIW.

See? And that's just for one pick--15 more to go.

But I'm fairly bent on finishing out this pool on a high note. To quote Calvin Tran:

Me and this pool. "Oh here go hell come."