2014 Pick 256 Final Results: And The Winner Is ...

Even though the NFL has one of the shortest seasons in professional sports, 17 weeks can be a long time. Especially if you're submitting picks every week. Our Pick 256 Challenge asked you to do just that in a season-long contest in which BTB members and readers got to pick the straight-up winners for all games each week - and many of you responded.

In total, 876 participants submitted their votes at least once during the contest period, but only 84 participants managed to submit their picks for every one of the 17 weeks of the contest.

Which is why we included a missed games policy in the contest: Every three weeks of full participation qualified participants for one freebie for a missed week. The maximum amount of possible freebies was four over the entire season, and the freebie points awarded for a missed week were the average of all participants for the weeks missed. Later in this post, participants who received a freebie will be marked with an asterisk in our results tables. Two freebies mean two asterisks, and so on.

Including the beneficiaries of our missed games policy increases the number of 17-week participants to 205, all of which we'll review a little further down this post.

But before we go there, let's first try to understand what a good season result looks like, by looking at the 2014 pick 'em results for some of the pick 'em panels we've been following this year.

Our Pick 256 consensus picks beat every single panelist on the pick 'em panels above except for Tim Cowlishaw and Cris Carter. That's pretty impressive. But even more impressive are the results of our season winners.

Pick 256 Challenge Season Winners

BTB-member Jebediah Flibberbrush turned in a masterful season-long performance, finishing four points clear of the next best participants with a season score of 184-72. Congratulations. Here are the top six of our challenge.

184 - Jebediah Flibberbrush

180 - aaa61aaa, revellyre

177 - boys.camncrew, LoboTX, Wildhair

Cowboys Whisperers

This award goes to those participants who correctly predicted the outcome of the most Cowboys games over the course of the season. If you had simply picked the Cowboys to win every game, you'd have 12 correct picks. 51 participants have exactly that many correct Cowboys picks, but they were out-picked by six BTB members who picked 13 Cowboys games correctly. Here are your six Cowboys Whisperers of 2014:

• bandoozle
• coolmajaka
• CowboysNation
• dentltek
• Jessy S
• Nord15

The Mike Florio Award

Just as there are Cowboys Whisperers among us, there are also anti-Cowboys Whisperers lurking on our board. This award, named after a bastion of journalistic objectivity, honors those among us who picked most Cowboys games wrong. We do recognize that many of the award recipients here picked against the Cowboys on purpose to ward off the evil ju ju, and we thank you for your sacrifice.

If you had simply picked against the Cowboys in every game, you'd have gotten 12 picks wrong. Nobody was that bad, but some came close. Here are the Mike Florio Award winners:

10 - Ride Together, Die Together; Zubius

9 - dandeogden

8 - Funoldman, Jeff Landrith

7 - braininahat, Mighty Blue Star, Bvanzanman, StarloverinWNC

6 - 33 participants picked six Cowboys game wrong.

Season Ranking

Here's a summary of the 205 participants who participated in all 17 regular season weeks, either as regular participants or as beneficiaries of our missed game policy.

My trusty sidekick Hookerhome will publish a FanPost with the full results sometime later this week, and you'll find the results of every single participant in that post.

This ends our Pick 256 Challenge for the year.

Thank you all for your participation.