Prognostication Overload: Picking the ACC

Here's the thing. I'm not a very interesting person to turn to for commentary in the preseason. Poring over depth charts taxes my television-addled attention span. I get sick of reading the same conference picks coming from every columnist in the country - despite the fact that the consensus will usually be right more often than my random thoughts. And of course, my biases are heavy, obvious, and wildly improable for this sport.

The mere thought of me tossing out an ill-informed predicted finish should be cause for great mockery.

Now there's two ways I can get around this problem. One is to just ignore the preseason, toss out a few random comments as the season progresses, and wait for basketball season like a True ACC Fan™. After all, it's not like anyone's coming here for football insights. That ain't a pigskin on top of the Old Well in that logo.

But where's the fun in that?

So instead, I present Option B, where I pick every football game in the ACC. There I can hide my ignorance amongst the obvious and the irrelevant selections - the OOC creampuffs, the middle of the pack toss-ups, the Duke games. And no matter what stupidity spews forth onto the screen, I'm picking every game, and no one can expect that to go well.

That's what I've done. I've taken a side in every matchup of the season, completing the entire process during commercials of the Colbert Report. The picks are roughly a 80/20 mixture of first impressions and wishful thinking, influenced by, and in some cases a perverse response to, the other ACC forecasts I've read. Over the next couple of days I'll roll them out, complete with justifications and thoughts that weren't present when I came to these conclusions.

I'll do September tomorrow. Come for the comedy value, stay for the betting pool on excatly how far my head is up my ass.