The Perils Of Picking The Underdogs: Pick 256 Challenge Results & Leaderboard

281 BTB-members took part in the Pick 256 challenge last week and tried to pick the winners in as many of the 14 games as possible. If they had simply picked the Vegas favorites straight up, they'd have gotten 10 games out of 14 right. Of course, going with the favorites would have meant going with the Giants over the Cowboys, which only 17 participants did.

So if you take 9-5 as a benchmark, which is what the consensus performance turned out to be, our panelists did an okay job overall. Six participants managed to correctly predict the winners of 11 games, 25 managed to predict 10 games correctly, and 105 got nine games right.

As a further point of comparison, NFLPickWatch.com tallied the Week 7 picks of 136 media experts. Only three of those panelists correctly predicted the winners of 11 or more games games. The worst "Pro Picker" on the NFLPickWatch panel got just four games right.

Each week, the key to getting a high pick count is the ability to correctly pick a handful of underdogs to come through. Do you think you can get the underdog winners right this week? Join our Pick 256 challenge below to find out.

Week 8 Picks

Click on the link below and you'll be taken directly to the Pick 256 entry form where you can select the Week 8 teams you like for the win.

The link above should auto-fill your BTB user name into the entry form (in most cases). In some cases, the link hasn't worked properly, so here's an alternative link that works without the auto-fill - just remember to spell your username correctly.

Alternative Pick 256 Entry Form

If you prefer not to use your BTB user name, or are not a BTB member, go ahead and enter a name of your choosing, but try to stick with that name throughout the season.

Week 7 Results

Top Finishers

You can find a full list of all results in a fanpost by BTB-member Hookerhome, so I'll just list the top finishers.

Here's what the top of our season leaderboard looks like, with a new leader at the top:

The fine print

Submissions have to be in by kickoff time of the Thursday night game, which kicks off at 8:25 pm ET on Thursday. To keep a level playing field for everybody, late submissions will not be accepted (all entries are time-stamped). This gives you a good two days to submit your picks.

Every week, we'll publish a spreadsheet with all the picks here on BTB, usually on Saturday.

The entry form contains detailed instruction on how you can change your picks at a later point, read them carefully. You can of course come back at any time before kickoff on Thursday and submit new picks. When there are multiple picks by the same BTB member, our pick tracker will always default to the latest entry.

With all of the technical stuff out of the way, good luck with your picks.