The Wisdom of Crowds: Predicting the Entire, 54-Game Pac-12 Schedule for 2012

To the delight of football fans across the country, the offseason is nearly over. In just two weeks from this Thursday, right around 4pm PDT, the season will officially kick off. The football season will have finally begun. I think the offseason is rather underrated, actually. Without the offseason, when would we have the time to squabble about who's stealing coaches or ask Mike Leach about which Pac-12 mascot would win in a battle royale? A couple weeks from now we'll have to think and talk about actual football games. Do you ever wish you could just skip the football season and get right back into the heart of silly season?

That's what we're hoping to accomplish today. Instead of deciding who wins games based on results on the field, let's just ask everyone to pick winners in each game. We can tally up the results, hand out some trophies and get right back to the inanity of the offseason. Who's with me?!

Last year we introduced a new variant of our preseason predictions: a Pac-12-wide prediction where we choose the winners of each of the conference's 54 games. It was a hit and generated more than 1000 submissions. Naturally, we're doing it again!

Since we're interested in outcomes for every team in the conference, we welcome ballots from all fanbases in the Pac-12. Buffaloes, Ducks, Trojans, Huskies--we invite all Pac-12 fans to participate. I think we can put our differences behind us, for science.

Unlike our Cal predictions where we ask for the probability of winning each game, here we're simply interested in picking winners. After the jump you'll find the ballot (or you can find it here if you are averse to jumping).

Fill it out by Sunday, August 26th and I'll turn the results into morsels of delicious wisdom shortly thereafter. Once again, our predictions will put Ted Miller's weekly predictions to shame.

NOTE: If you are having difficulty finding the submit button, use the scroll bar on the right to make sure you have scrolled all the way down. Alternately, you can fill out the form here.