In August, a good friend invited me to join an NFL “survivor pool.” For purposes of this blog, I’ll call him “Jonathan.”
For the ignorant, a classic survivor pool involves picking the winner of one NFL game each week. Pick correctly and you survive. Otherwise, you’re out. The last survivor wins the entire sum of each participant’s entry fee. The most important rule is that once you select a team to win, you cannot select that team again for the rest of the season.
Jonathan’s pool (actually run by his brother, an NYC KKing-pin) offered a couple of twists on the classic structure. First of all, like a high-low split-pot poker game, the prize pool is split into two halves. One half goes to the last survivor. The other half goes to the participant with the best overall record at the end of the season. This feature allows us to keeping picking games, even after suffering a loss.
The other wrinkle is that in weeks 11 through 17, we must pick two games per week instead of one.
Got it?
I was sailing along through the first 8 weeks, correctly picking Dallas over the Giants in week 5. Then Miami upset Arizona when the Cardinals suspiciously missed a late field goal attempt and poof! Still contending for the overall best record, I wore a mask over my disappointment and pressed forward with renewed energy.
Then Dallas won a road game at Minnesota in week 11, giving me two losses. This game blew up in the face of numerous players, and entering week 13 there were no undefeated survivors and 34 remaining entries with either one or two losses. Approx. 75% of those contenders picked the Raiders to beat the Jets, but not I, having successfully picked the high variance squad from Las Vegas in week 10.
Jonathan called me Saturday to catch up and said he would endorse my entry as his own picks had met with multiple disasters. He specifically endorsed my week 13 picks of Chicago over Detroit, and Pittsburgh in a lock over the Football Team from Washington. Things were looking good on Sunday afternoon, until they weren’t. Jonathan emailed me this morning, writing “Ugh I jinxed you.”
Right here, in this blog, right now, for the first time in any public forum, I’m going to share my reply.
“… for the record, the Bears, Jets and Steelers are no longer my favorite teams. Never were, aren’t today and never will be. Losers. F— them!
“It is pretty obvious there was mass cheating going on. While I didn’t pick the Jets, approx. 75% of the 1- and 2-loss survivors did pick the Raiders. The Jets scored 28 points, as many as they have scored all season. Then with a few seconds remaining, their cornerback deliberately slowed down to leave the Raiders receiver wide open for the winning touchdown. If you look at the replay in slow motion on One America Network or Newsmax, you can see the cornerback slow down. An investigation is needed. My elite Survivor Pool Strike Force will be calling on the league not to certify the game. THE JETS WON!
“And the Bears. They had a 10-point lead with less than 3 minutes remaining. The game should have been called right then. With a 3-point lead and less than 2-minutes remaining, their quarterback Bitch Trubisky fumbled away the ball inside his 10-yard line. He should never have been drafted into the NFL and probably never attended classes at UNC. I have affidavits from eye-witnesses including Mike Ditka swearing they saw Lions players stuffing money into “Bitch’s” uniform.
“And the Steelers, who are from Pitiful Pittsburgh, represent an entire industry that has gotten soft under the failed policies of Barack “HUSSEIN” Obama. The great American workers of the steel industry, who are strong on borders and the military, deserve better than an undefeated team that loses to the Washington DC swamp (where my daughter lives), where radical liberals forced the owner, a proud Patriot, to abandon the team’s sacred and racist nickname despite there being good people on both sides. This is being investigated as well. If you look at the scoreboard carefully (you can trust replays on OAN or Newsmax), see how the scoreboard abruptly shifts the score in Washing-scams favor at the 9:09, 2:07 and 0:17 marks of the 4th quarter. Never in history has that happened! ALL CAPS!!”
It cannot possibly be just a coincidence that my first loss in this pool came in the once reliable but now corrupt state of Arizona. And the shenanigans in week 13 involved the team from New York, where I was once loved but now badly mistreated, the team that moved in the middle of the night (did anyone see them actually move?) from California to Nevada, and a game played in Pennsylvania, where nothing that happens should ever be certified until it has been reversed. I’ll be sending clones of the same lawyer to each of these places.
Never in history has a survivor pool participant been treated more unfairly. A lot of people are saying that.
