Borderline Fantastic Sports

The Grammy nominees were announced not too long ago and I finally got around to putting up Grammy Picks on Ice Cream Helmet. With the Emmys I set it up to easily add award games to ICH. Turns out I got a little lazy in that effort. But now, it is easy. So look forward to the Oscars again plus the Golden Globes. If you think other award shows are worthy, then drop a comment and let me know.

For Grammy Picks, I picked the 35 categories I though most people might care about (there are 78 total categories). I’m still not entirely sure the different between Performance and Song. I can kind of guess, but I’m not sure which is which. I also went with some interesting categories from the bottom of the list for Spoken Word, Music Videos, Historical, Boxed Sets, Liner Notes, maybe some other I forgot about.

The Grammys are on February 12th at 8pm Eastern on CBS (hint, that’s the deadline). You can create your groups and make your picks now.

Grammy Picks on ICH
Make Picks

College Football and NFL Pickem are up and running for the 2011 season.

Home Page – The home page now shows all of your groups and status for the current week. With this, you can see what picks you need to make (including wager points).

Easier Invites – Inviting to a group now lets you select your ICH friends and if you have connected your account to Facebook, you can also select your Facebook friends who have also connected to ICH. The option remains to invite by email.

Group Page Commeting – Trying this out, let me know what you think. Still trying to make it look nice. Only members of the group will be able to comment, but using an external system, so user names not matching could be confusing.

Facebook Profile Pictures – If you have connected with Facebook, you can select to have your Facebook profile picture as your card picture. When you change your Facebook profile picture, it will change on ICH as well with no action on your part.

Leave comments with any additional suggestions. Trying to make things as easy to use as possible. Also looking for any additional sports or games to try out.

I just put together Emmy Pickem over on Ice Cream Helmet. This is the first time I’m doing an award show other than the Oscars.

I picked the major categories and if you create your own group, you can set point values for each category.

The nominees were announced this morning. The awards are announced on September 18th.

Make ICH Picks or head on over to the site to create a group and invite your friends.

I’d love suggestions of other award shows to consider doing on ICH.

My Ice Cream Helmets have never had a home. They were displayed on a shelf with my hats in my old room. I don’t even think they made the trip to my first apartment. Here at my current apartment, they found a shelf of their own next to my TV, but it was more of a pile than a display. I hadn’t really thought about it too hard, but my mom had.

She was talking to a patient of hers who does woodwork and somehow they hatched a plan for a project. My mom had originally wanted some sort of enclosed case that could be hung on the wall so that I didn’t have to worry about my helmets getting dusty. These aren’t the most high quality items. The logos come off pretty easily on some of them.

The guy thought about that idea, but thought it might be too heavy. He came up with his own design and made it out of a really light wood so they could be easily hung on the wall.

On Christmas morning, I was down to my last present. I hadn’t asked for too much and I had already opened those. So I was extra curious what could possibly be in my last box that was saved for after everyone else was done and mom had the camera ready.

My first question was how many could each one hold. Each has 16, he couldn’t come up with a good design to have 14 on the AL one and 16 on the NL one. Probably good. If there is another expansion, it should be to have 16 in each league. Any more than that and I’m in trouble, but I think I have some time.

I sent a picture over to Evan on Christmas morning and it was forwarded to his mom letting her know she should get in contact with my mom to place an order.

After being back to school for a week I finally had a chance to hang them up.

As for the helmets, I obviously have some work to do in the AL. If you consider the two fewer teams, they aren’t that far behind. It just looks more obvious because the corner spots aren’t filled yet.

I’m currently missing four helmets of places I have been:
Orioles – I’ve been to Camden Yards, but it was before I had started collecting the helmets. I’ve already looked at the schedule and found two promising weekends in April.
Giants, A’s, Dodgers – Something about California. The Padres were the only stadium to have helmets on the trip. We didn’t go to Anaheim, so I can’t speak for them. The A’s had helmets for popcorn and french fries. I have one of those larger helmets, but will not be putting it on this display. The Dodgers may have had them, but Evan bought the tickets for the outfield seats and you aren’t allowed to leave that section.

The post positions were set today, so you can now make your picks.

Make ICH Picks

You pick how you expect all 20 horses to finish. The default scoring is as follows (you can change any of these values if you create your own group):

Correct Pick: 2 points
Correct Win: 20 points
Correct Place: 10 points
Correct Show: 5 points
Correct Last: 1 point
1 Finish Position off: 1 point
Each Finish Position off by more than 1: -0.2 points (If you pick a horse to finish 5th and it finished 7th, that is 2 positions off, so you would get 0.8 points)

Perhaps a little complicated, but I wanted something more than just Win, Place, Show. It’s so difficult to get finish positions exactly right, so I wanted some value in being close. Create your groups with whatever settings you like. If you have some suggestions to improve the default scoring, leave a comment.

It’s Opening Night. Baseball Picks is back on Ice Cream Helmet again this season. Here are the top 10 rated series that can be picked for Week 1. No surprise, tonight’s Yankees/Red Sox game is on the list. Make your picks!

With the Super Bowl over, here are the final standings for picks for this season. The scores here are for correct picks during the regular season and playoffs.

Olympic Pickem, if that’s what you want to call it, is here and ready for you to make your picks.

I’d wanted to do something for the last Olympics but I couldn’t wrap my head around a decent idea. The Winter Games has a lot fewer events. So I started with something simple. Just pick a country in each of the 86 events. If that country wins a medal, you get points. Simple enough. No dealing with individual athletes, that would get confusing in half a second.

Olympics Picks Site – Go here to sign-up or create your own group. If you have your own group, you can set the point values for different medals. Maybe to you, silver is just one of the losers.

Make Your ICH Picks – Open to everyone, just need an ICH account.

If you have suggestions for next time around, leave them in the comments.

Some things I thought of that I’d like feedback on …
I didn’t include any sort of wager or confidence points.
The country list is the same for every event. I didn’t have time to research what countries had participants in each event.
Perhaps a subset of the most popular events would be a better option.
Maybe each country can only be selected once (or a set number of times). I’d imagine some people would just pick the USA in every event.
Deadlines before each event. This year all picks have to be in before the 1st event starts on the morning of February 12th.

Remember, for Bowl Picks, picks were not made against the spread and each game was ranked 1-34 based on confidence.

Final Regular Season Standings

We’re a week away from tip-off of the NBA season. Once again this year you can play NBA Pickem on Ice Cream Helmet. Just like last year you can make your picks on the Top 10 rated games each week or create your own group and customize how many you wish for your group to pick. Making picks on the Top 10 will add to your ICH Score.

Last year I had the highest ICH Score for Basketball Picks with 23. Yea, 23. That topped the second place person by 23. Yea, I guess no one else made any picks.

Basketball Picks