The Victors Tailgate

A party on the road

The Record Book

Twenty-one seasons of weekly picks · 2005–2025

Every pick, every best bet, every collapse in the bowl games — pulled out of the season spreadsheets and counted. Find your name. Then find your friend’s.

Champions

2005–2025 · 21 titles

Twenty-one seasons, different names on the trophy. Shaded years are repeat winners.

The field keeps growing

Entrants per season

And keeps getting the same grade

Share of all picks correct, whole field

The Book

Career records

Every person who has ever turned in a sheet. Type a name, or sort by any column. Click a row for the full card.

Records & Oddities

2011–2025 scored weeks

How People Pick

2014–2025

Every pick either sides with the crowd or fights it. Going with the field hits . Going against it hits . The crowd is not stupid — but it is not the whole story either.

Herd instinct vs. results

Each dot is one picker · 500+ picks
Right of center = sides with the crowd more often. Higher = wins more often.

What the numbers say

Field-wide splits

Chalk merchants

Highest share of picks matching the crowd

Free thinkers

Lowest share of picks matching the crowd

The Games

Scored games

Most weeks land somewhere near a coin flip once the spread is on. A handful of games took the entire room down with them.

How hard was the average game?

Games grouped by share of the field that got them right
The bump on the right is chalk in non-spread games. The tail on the left is where the group chat lit up.

Teams

Backed vs. delivered

Which logos have been good to this pool, and which ones keep taking their money.

Good to us

Best hit rate when picked · 400+ picks

Bad to us

Worst hit rate when picked · 400+ picks

Overrated by the room

Backed far more than they delivered

Underrated by the room

Delivered far more than they were backed

Michigan

The heart of the problem

The Game

Every year since 2014 · 2020 was canceled, 2021 fell in the week that was never scored

The other one

Every year since 2014 · 2020 is missing for the same reason

True believers

Picks Michigan most often · 40+ Michigan games

Fade the Wolverines

Picks Michigan least often

Superlatives

Handed out by the spreadsheet

Where these numbers come from

Two sets of sources. 2011–2025 comes from the season workbooks: weekly points and correct-pick counts were recomputed from the raw pick grids and checked against each workbook’s own totals — 13,546 person-weeks matched exactly, with zero disagreements — then checked again against the published final standings, where 39 of 45 top-three finishes match to the point. 2005–2010 comes from the original discussion pages, whose bowl grids carry every player’s picks and whose totals rows carry the full-season records. All 18 top-three finishes on those six pages reproduce the Hall of Fame exactly.

What the early seasons can and cannot tell you

Those pages kept the whole season’s totals but only the bowl games in detail — the weekly grids lived on separate pages that no longer exist. So 2005–2010 count fully toward career records, hit rates, titles and the season table, and are marked “totals only” in the champions strip. They are deliberately absent from anything that needs week-by-week detail: best and worst weeks, perfect weeks, streaks, consistency, and weeks won.

Caveats worth knowing