By Kurtis Hanni

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, things have changed. This year at Pigskin Pick Six a decision was made to move the game from an email based game to a website based game. Why you ask? Many reasons, but lets start with a story.

Pigskin Pick Six was started in 2006 by John Stovall. It started as a cozy group of 25 friends playing the game we still play today. Sure, scoring was a little different and it might have been a bit easier to win a week(or the whole thing), but the essence is the same: college football fans having fun with a new way to follow the sport they
loved. While the group grew to over 200 people in 2012, the charm was still there. For those who have been around for a couple years, you have seen the maturation in the game. Originally, the picks were made via sending spreadsheets to John (and his team of volunteers) to manually enter the data to a master sheet, then updated to the leaderboard. In 2012, for the first time, an effort was made to automate much of the process. For each volunteer, manual entry was taking at least one full evening a week to complete. This meant more delays in getting the leaderboard out and more possibilities of error. With automation, much of that has been improved. With the implementation of this website, we hope to achieve a few things:

1. One central source of information. With the emails, it made keeping track of the game difficult. If you wanted an old pick sheet or leaderboard, that meant scouring through email after email hoping you happened across what you needed. Hopefully the website will allow everyone to be engaged and aware of what is going on in the PP6 universe.
2. Reduce the number of emails sent. So many have complained they missed the email, it got sent to spam, or just that they got too many emails. As the administrators, believe me, we felt your pain. With the implementation of the website there will be one email sent a week: a reminder that picks are due soon.
3. To make more information available. With an email, only so much information can be sent. With many weeks containing 4 or more attachments, it took a lot of work to curate and send out at one time. With the website, this information can be curated at a less frantic pace, and possibly even mean more information is available.
4. To provide a context of history. As the contest grows in size and years, it is always interesting to see what the past held. Hopefully this website will allow us to bring you more stats, more history. Who is the best player in the history of PP6? Who is the worst? This format will allow us to provide you with more information, just because it’s fun.

As this website evolves, feel free to check it as often as possible. We hope to update it with multiple posts weekly, providing you with interesting information on the game and college football. We hope this site will make submission of picks easier and allow you to take in each weeks games with a perspective on what is happening and how it compares to the past. Hopefully this experience will be as fun for you as it is for us.   This is an ever evolving process, and we want to bring you the best product we can. Invite friends and feel free to give us suggestions! We look forward to what the 2014 Pigskin Pick Six has in store for us all.