ACC Football Staff Predictions: Week 5

The problem with making grand proclamations in this almighty role as picks maven is that sometimes people will be upset with your decisions. Take our wonderful senior writer, Jake.

So, if you remember from last week, Jake tried to get away with a little chicanery in terms of who he selected for teams, just copying last year’s champion, Evan. This was after he had copied Evan the first week, and then made real picks the second week the build a slight lead over him. After much debate, once Jake didn’t use the exact same wording, I ruled that all of his picks were invalid.

This didn’t go over well.

A conference ensued, words were exchanged, Jake thought that I was being unfair to not give him a chance to fix his wording. While this mostly fell on deaf ears, I did have to admit that not telling him ahead of time was a little unfair. So, I decided to allow last week’s picks to count, but Jake agreed to no longer use the trope of directly copying someone’s picks.

He’d have to copy the pics from the sheet like the rest of us.

Overall, copying picks may not have been the best of ideas, as most of us didn’t do that great for the second week in a row. Here’s how last week shook out:

Yeah, we’re not going to talk about that UNC/Georgia Tech game any more.

I actually had a good week, besides the UNC and NC State games, which everyone got wrong, I went 8-2 and managed to club my way out of the basement. On the other side of that, Akil took a few chances and...struck out. Badly. I gave him credit for getting Syracuse right because his pick seemed very anti-Liberty, we’ll see if he is happy to let it slide.

So, with these new rules in place and everyone on the same page, let’s look and see how this week went:

Umm, Jake? Jake???

So, Jake may not be appearing on the predictions sheets anymore as it looks like he may have gotten the last laugh. He’ll basically say “in the weeks I participated, I didn’t finish last.” Enjoy Italy, sir!

Who would have thought that the Clemson/BC game would have been one of the biggest areas of disagreement? I actually thought about it, but without their regular starting quarterback I felt like Clemson would have a bounce back game. The action all starts tomorrow with a big Miami/UVA game, the other one with a lot of disagreement.

Will there be any more separation next week? We’ll see.

9/29 5 pm update

The thing about time zones is that when someone is six hours ahead of you, you can’t message them at 3 AM their time to say “hey, you going to make a pick?” Seeing as how Jake is doing this thing called “serving our country” and he actually admitted he made a mistake by not submitting his picks on time, I allowed him to slide on in...this time. For the second time in a week, he appreciated my generosity. So, here are your CORRECT picks by the THB Staff