Join Our Pick 'Em And Survivor Leagues!

As we've done for the past few years, we are going to have a Pick 'Em league and a Survivor pool, courtesy of our friends at Yahoo! Sports.

The Pick 'Em pool is just what it sounds like. . .every week, you'll pick each of the NFL games, straight-up with no point spreads. What makes this league different is the use of "confidence points." The "confidence points" are, as you might expect, a measure of how strongly you feel about the results of a particular game. If you think a team is a lead-pipe cinch to win in a particular week, you might put 16 "confidence points" on them. . .or whatever the highest value for that week is once the bye weeks start. If you don't have a lot of faith in one of your picks, you can assign that game a lower value. If you make the correct pick, you get the number of confidence points that you assigned to that particular match-up.

We've got the league set up so that it will drop your lowest weekly point score at the end of the season. . .so if you manage to miss a week and score a zero, it isn't the end for you. It would be best for you not to miss any more after that, though, because any zeroes you get after that would stick.

If you'd like to join the Pick 'Em group, head on over to the Yahoo! Sports Pro Football Pick 'Em page, and select "Join a Group." The group ID for our league is 50058, and the password is sk0lvikings. It's all lower case, and that's a zero in there, not the letter o.

The Survival Pool is a bit if a different animal. Each week, you will pick one team that you think is going to be victorious in a particular week. If that team happens to lose, you're out of the pool. If the team that you selected wins, you remain in the pool for another week, but you can't pick a team that you've picked previously. So, if you pick Minnesota to beat Detroit in Week 1 and they do so, you would move on in the pool, but you wouldn't be able to pick the Vikings again for the rest of the season. The last person standing is your winner.

We saw a pretty rare feat in last year's Survivor Pool. One of our members, HolySchnikes, went through the entire regular season without getting knocked out of the pool. He had won the whole thing by Week 11, but kept going the rest of the way and wound up with a perfect 17-0 mark. Can you match his mark from last year? There's only one way to find out!

Head on over to the Yahoo! Sports Survival Football page, and select "Join a Group." Our group ID for that one is 23703, and the password is again sk0lvikings. Once again, it's all lower case, and that's a zero there, not the letter o.

Picks need to be in 5 minutes before the kickoff of the first game of the week, folks. . .in this case, that happens on Thursday night with the Baltimore Ravens opening up defense of their championship against the Denver Broncos. I hope to see a lot of folks joining up this season!