It occurred to me today I’m going about the Circa Millions experience all wrong. The way I do it now is I make the picks, then watch the games in hope of the picks being correct. It’s like I’m willing the players on the screen to conform to what I predicted about them, and as it often turns out, they don’t want to oblige. The imaginary joystick is losing its bluetooth connection just when I need someone to make a tackle.
But this is obviously a ridiculous way to look at things. Reality is always the final boss, the supreme law of the land. I should be rooting for it to counterfeit my false picks and only affirm the ones that were true. In short, instead of trying to muscle reality into my dumb assumptions about it, I can let it cleanse me of false notions, purify my vision and inform my actions going forward.
If your picks are bad, they *should* lose. And by “bad” I mean the ones that don’t cover. In other words, if it didn’t cover the pick was bad, and if the pick was bad, not covering was its fate from the time you made it. You would prefer to have found out *before* making it, but better late than never. The guy who goes 0-5 in Circa, but gets hit by a bus Sunday morning is truly deprived of this lesson. He has no idea he was living a lie.
The purpose of the contest then is to expose yourself to the delta between what you thought was true and what is true. It’s the purpose of any experiment worth doing and you only shrink that delta by prioritizing reality over your preferences and assumptions. Which I did not as I was fruitlessly rooting for the 49ers and Packers to cover rather than accepting what was unfolding in front of my face.
I had Justin Fields, Breece Hall, Courtland Sutton and Garrett Wilson going in that London game. It was one of the worst games I’ve watched in any sport, at any level.
The league I had Fields is a QB-Flex, and you lose 1 point per sack. He took nine, finished with minus four points. IOW I should have started Lamar Jackson over him.
Of the nine sacks Fields took, maybe three were unavoidable. He just couldn’t make a decision with the ball until it was too late. I mean at least take off and scramble! Throw it into double coverage! Throw it away! He took a sack to end the game on fourth down! Just throw it into a crowd!
The only thing as bad as the game was the announcing. Rich Eisen is depressing. He’s not someone you would want to watch a game with and yet you have no choice. The reason Al Michaels and Vin Scully are the greats is it’s obvious they love watching their sport and are thrilled to be there calling the games. Eisen seems miserable to me, and misery is contagious.
Kurt Warner was maybe even worse. How many times are you going to express the Jets need for caution (punting) on 4th-and-inches? Dude, they are 0-and-fucking-5, it’s fourth and inches! Aaron Glenn is not long for NFL head coaching either way. It’s so obvious they need to go for it, just from a spiritual, for-the-good-of-humanity perspective, why would you even think about punting? Just the moronic “adult-in-the-room” super cautious scold tone, like what Troy Aikman used to be before he grew a pair. Obviously you go for it unless you’re retarded. But if you’re really really retarded, you try to draw them offsides, get into punt formation, then fake the punt! That’s what the Jets actually did, and while they picked up the first down (barely), why would you fake a punt to get six inches?
Of course there was the end of half fiasco where Garrett Wilson was openly disgusted walking off the field as the Jets let the clock run out on 4th down rather than try a Hail Mary.
Speaking of which, Wilson hurt his knee and is getting it tested. I have Wilson on two teams, including my formerly (and likely never again) first place Primetime team that already lost Malik Nabers, and also has Puka Nacua. My guess is Wilson is okay from his demeanor and interview, but obviously hard to say until we see the results. Best case he gets traded somewhere.
The Jets defense actually played great, but seems like the wheels have fallen off entirely now.
Evan Engram is getting regular work, think he’ll be reliable going forward.
The $100K buy-in Circa Survivor Grandissimo looked like this:
Talk about pot odds! You really, really, really wanted to be on the Colts or Rams. Could even have made a million-dollar money line bet on the Packers to win 90K or so. In fact, the Colts/Rams guys should have agreed in advance to a split wherein they either pocket the 90K each or chop two ways if the Packers lost. Only downside would be if all three teams lost, but that’s very unlikely and hedgeable via parlay. Of course, having the liquidity to do all that (and getting the book to sign off) might be a challenge. But Circa should (if they don’t already) make those services available to people with big equity in the contests.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Real Man Sports to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.