Remember This in 1986

This is really cool!

Is Bo Jackson the best video game football player ever?

DAY ONE - Brackets

The first round of the Greatest Tournament of All Time kicks off tomorrow. To recap, we've set up 64 brackets with 32 teams in each bracket. That makes a grand total of 2,048 teams in the tournament field, and 1,024 games to be played in the first round alone.

We'll play the first round of at least one bracket each day until the first round for all 64 brackets is completed, which should probably be sometime around the beginning of April.

The following are the first four brackets set to play. Click for a larger picture.

BRACKET #03

BRACKET #05

BRACKET #45

BRACKET #62

G I JOE Trailer

Transformers Trailer

More Tournament Info

The Greatest Tournament of All Time is only a little more than a day away from kicking off, which means I better squeeze in an explanation about how this thing is going to work.

It took a little help from my partner in Excel, Curtis, to be able to seed 2,048 teams, but we got the job done. To determine which team got what seed, we ordered every team that played in Division 1-A in my lifetime (1977-present) by their power rating. The power rating came from my own top secret formula, and wouldn't have been possible without the wonderful resource that is James Howell.

The top 2,048 teams qualified for this tournament. To give you an idea of how grand in scope this is, that's more than half of the 3,719 teams that were eligible. Florida State, Georgia, and Nebraska are the only three schools to have all 32 years worth of teams make the bracket. Even Princeton and Yale are represented in the field!

To make this whole ordeal manageable, we divided the BIG bracket into 64 smaller, 32-team brackets. That means in a couple months we'll have 64 bracket winners ready to be plugged into the final "Bracket of Champions".

Now for some actual data. On Thursday, the tournament will officially get under way with the first round of games, starting with Bracket #3. Without further ado, here is the first bracket (click for larger image).

We've Got Your Tournament

The Super Bowl is over and the Pittsburgh Steelers are your new NFL champs. But here at Pikes Picks we're keeping the football season going through the winter and on into the spring.

Prepare yourself, because in just a few days I will unveil the first few matchups of what we are calling "THE GREATEST TOURNAMENT OF ALL TIME!"

Thanks to the great James Howell [LINK], I have devised a computer ranking system that assigns a power rating to every team that has played Division 1A college football in my lifetime (1977-present - that's 32 seasons with of college football and over 3,700 teams).

We put together a tournament field with the top 2,048 teams according to those power ratings. So over the next few months, using offensive and defensive statistics for each team, as well as a score predictor formula I devised, we will run a computer simulation and post results for every single tournament game until we have an ultimate Champion.

That's right - over 2,000 teams will compete on the field for the chance to be crowned "Greatest Team of My Lifetime".

This should be quite a tournament as just about all of your favorite players from the past three decades will surely be involved. From Bo Jackson to Tommie Frazier to Brian Bosworth, the matchups you've only dreamed about will take place before your eyes & on my computer screen.

So get out your pencils and research materials and prepare to fill out a bracket that will put "March Madness" to shame. Stay tuned...