BCS DECLARES GERMANY WINNER OF WORLD WAR II; US Ranked 4th

After determining the Big-12 championship game participants the BCS computers were put to work on other major contests and today the BCS declared Germany to be the winner of World War II.

"Germany put together an incredible number of victories beginning with the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland and continuing on into conference play with defeats of Poland, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. Their only losses came against the US and Russia; however considering their entire body of work--including an incredibly tough Strength of Schedule--our computers deemed them worthy of the #1 ranking."

Questioned about the #4 ranking of the United States the BCS commissioner stated "The US only had two major victories--Japan and Germany. The computer models, unlike humans, aren't influenced by head-to-head contests--they consider each contest to be only a single, equally-weighted event."

German Chancellor Adolph Hitler said "Yes, we lost to the US; but we defeated #2 ranked France in only 6 weeks." Herr Hitler has been criticized for seeking dramatic victories to earn 'style points' to enhance Germany's rankings. Hitler protested "Our contest with Poland was in doubt until the final day and the conditions in Norway were incredibly challenging and demanded the application of additional forces."

The French ranking has also come under scrutiny. The BCS commented "France had a single loss against Germany and following a preseason #1 ranking they only fell to #2."

Japan was ranked #3 with victories including Manchuria, Borneo and the Philippines.

Author: Unknown

As detailed in the previous news item, we've made some additional options available for bowl season. League commissioners can choose

1) each bowl game to include in the league's postseason "week" (defaults to the choices you made prior to the season);

2) whether the pick deadline will be a) prior to the league's first bowl game or b) five minutes prior to each game (defaults to prior to the first bowl game); and

3) which bowl game will be the league's tiebreaker for bowl "week" (defaults to the final game your league is picking).

Commissioners will be able to make these choices between Monday, December 8 and Friday, December 19.

Still some programming to do, but we're planning to expand the options allowed for the postseason.

* Each league commissioner will get to choose what bowl games to include on a game-by-game basis. This choice can be made between December 9 and December 14. On the 15th you'll be able to start making picks; the first bowl game is on the 20th. Include as many or few games as ya like.

* Each league commissioner will get to choose the deadline for bowl picks. Option 1) All bowl picks are due 5 minutes prior to the league's first bowl game (which is how it works during the season); or Option 2) Each bowl pick is due 5 minutes prior to each game.

As for the weekend of December 6 (Week 15)--which includes regular season games and conference championship games--all games will basically be treated as a regular game in a regular week, so championship games will be included if and only if they fit into your league's season settings. You can change settings for Week 15 between November 27 and November 30.

League commissioners can now change many of the options that each league decided on prior to the season. New settings take effect the week following the change.

* Add or remove conferences from your league
* Add or remove non-Saturday games
* Change bowl game options
* Change tiebreaker
* Begin or stop using the spread

Keep in mind that making changes won't affect the games already posted for this week, but when the next week's games are posted your new options will be used.

Starting today, all games are scored in real time rather than periodically throughout the day as it had been before this week. League scoring e-mails will still go out Saturday night or Sunday morning, but you can check up to date scores any time.

Also, there is now a mobile site up and running. Visit http://m.pickem2008.com for a live scoreboard (final scores only), up to the minute league standings, and your league's picks.

I'm currently working toward implementing real-time scoring for the site. It's almost ready for testing.... I'll continue working on it throughout the day and hopefully do some experimenting tomorrow.

More to come....

This game was played Friday night rather than on Saturday and has been removed from leagues whose deadline was Saturday morning to ensure that no picks of that game were made after it took place.

Stanford-TCU will kickoff at 1 ET/12 CT, Air Force-Houston has been moved to Dallas, Oklahoma State-Missouri State will kickoff at 1:05 ET/12:05 CT, and Washington State-Baylor has been moved to Friday night.

The Washington State-Baylor game has been removed from the picks list of teams in Saturday-only leagues. Also, because the game is less than 24 hours away, the game has been removed from the picks list of teams in leagues whose deadline would be changed due to the time change. In other words, if your league's deadline was Saturday and the Washington State-Baylor game would've changed the deadline to Friday, the game was deleted from your league so the deadline wouldn't be changed this late in the week.

So far this season three games have been canceled or postponed due to hurricanes, including the Arkansas-Texas game scheduled for Austin this weekend.

Hurricane Ike will force Arkansas-Texas to September 27 (Week 5). The game has been removed from the Week 3 pick page. Leagues who had Arkansas-Texas as their tiebreaker this weekend have been given a new game and members of those leagues were e-mailed Wednesday.

The LSU-Troy game that was postponed due to Hurricane Gustav a couple weeks ago will be played November 15 (Week 12).

The New Mexico State-Nicholls State game that was to be played that same weekend has been canceled. NMSU will fill the hole in their schedule with a game against Alcorn State on October 4 (Week 6).