Guest Blog: Pickmoto Rates the ESPN NFL Experts, Week 9

Editor’s note: This blog is a series from Pickmoto, a fantasy sports mobile app.

Week 9 featured four games that the ESPNers split evenly on: Dolphins-Colts, Bucs-Raiders, Steelers-Giants, and Eagles-Saints. It’s these close calls, these coin tosses that should offer the best opportunity for prognosticators to demonstrate superior insight.

And by that measure, Ron Jaworski was the top Expert Week 9. Actually, by any metric he was. He went 12-2 total, 4-0 in the close calls, and gained 43 points on our Pickmoto scoring system. Jaworski’s only misses were the Cowboys and RGIII over Cam, which all dozen had backwards.

Of course, The Colts and Steelers baaaaaaaarely won. But we’re not talking knuckles scraping the endzone or replacement ref fiascos. Jaws went a legitimate 4-0. He’s now closing in on the magic 300, the number a beagle should get if he made picks every week.
Elsewhere, the top 2 and bottom 2 put some distance between themselves and 300. Wickersham usually picks a big upset, but smartly passed this week. Mort went out a ledge with the Browns and Jaguars, but was strong enough with his other picks to still take home a positive number.

At the other end of things, Allen and Jackson both went 10-4, but their wins came in low point value games, so they fell even further behind. Allen, we like because of his work in the Bay Area. Jackson, we’ve been tuning out for years and now we have empirical proof why we should continue.

ESPN Experts Leaderboard – Week 9
-Everyone starts with 300 points.

+Seth Wickersham – 668
+Chris Mortensen – 576
Keyshawn Johnson – 333
Adam Schefter – 320
+Ron Jaworski – 279
Merrill Hoge – 277
+Mike Golic – 229
+Cris Carter – 226
+Mark Schlereth – 208
+Mike Ditka – 166
Eric Allen – 142
Tom Jackson – 125

Pickmoto is fun, quick, easy competition. It recreates the fantasy sports experience on mobile. Its first game for the 2012 NFL season is free for iPhone and iPad. Its second game for the NBA season just hit the AppStore.

Pickmoto asks the most basic question in sports – which teams will win. It’s pick’em with a twist: there’s a crowdsourced scoring system that rewards correct picks based on their popularity – the less popular, the more points.

MLB Sets One-Day ‘Beat the Streak’ Contest With $5.6 Million Prize

Fantasy baseball game alert — Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media department is staging a one-day contest on Friday, Sept. 28, with a potential $5.6 million prize for the person who can correctly pick 57 major league baseball players who will get a hit in a game on Friday. If you go 57-for-57, MLBAM will award you $5.6 million. Sign up here.

Why is this contest being staged? Mainly because nobody has been able to win the big “Beat the Streak” prize in the contest’s 12 years of existence. As the MLBAM said in a press release:

We tried to give millions of dollars away. We have really tried. Again. However, it is with a sense of anguish that today we announce for the 12th consecutive season no fan will achieve fantasy baseball immortality by surpassing the legendary consecutive games hitting streak record of 56 and claiming a $5.6 million grand prize in the process. Maybe it is harder than originally envisioned when we debuted Beat The Streak in 2001 with a $10,000 grand prize.

Wedge Buster Closes Series A Funding as it Launches a set of Social Media Games

Wedge Busters

While looking into RocketPlay, a company that has started developing gaming apps for social media I also started looking around for others in this field since it is relatively new and seems to offer a great deal of opportunity.

Enter Wedge Buster, a startup formed last year and based in Los Angeles that has just closed its first round of funding which will give it a $2.2 million cash infusion and which already has its site up and running.

Wedge Buster is focusing on two different but related areas, sports gaming and fantasy sports, and will be presenting its offerings on two related but different platforms, social media and mobile platforms.

The Series A funding round has some interesting investors including NFL quarterback Drew Brees, pro skater Rob Dyrdek, 37 Venture Technologies as well as some angel investors that the company said include players in the gaming and media industry. The company said that it will use the funding to speed game development, support marketing strategies and expand the distribution gaming network with media companies.

It already has a stable of games at or near a stage where they can be played by users. It has ether developed or acquired 100 games and since its launch earlier this week has a number of games already available.

Among the games is Soccer Trouble, Around the World Darts, WB Striker, WB Footy and a number of others that span everything from baseball to sharpshooting. Currently in the fantasy space it has four offerings including one where it offers a Fantasy Football Commissioner with SI and Turner. The company is now launching on Facebook and expects to soon be launching on Android and Apple phones as well in the near future.

The potential of this space appears to be huge. Earlier this year Juniper Research said that overall, games and infotainment in the mobile space is expected to become a $65 billion market by 2016 due to the growing move to mobile devices.

Wedge Buster claims that others are missing the value that social media offers, but are they? Also are the barriers to entry that high that established Internet players cannot quickly enter? I think the answer to both of these is no.

In the area of Fantasy sports look at RotoWire, which has a presence on Facebook as well as on the Internet and mobile apps as well. Its rivals also have followed suit. Then players like Zynga have entered this type of social games with its first partnership.

Others are sure to follow since this is obviously a growth area and so established players in the gaming field such as EA Sports see opportunity here. That said with its broad based approach, having so many games that can appeal to a wide, diverse audience will certainly place Wedge Buster in a good position right from the start.

NFL Invites Fantasy Fans to Try for $1 million Prize

NFL Fantasy Perfect Challenge

Pro Football game that count are almost upon us and so many fantasy football leagues are preparing for their leagues drafts by pouring over fact sheets and looking at who has been waived and picked up- but there is another way to use that knowledge by playing in the NFL Fantasy Perfect Challenge.

While I am sure that winning your league comes with some valuable perks, there is the potential to win $1 million in the NFL fantasy game, and I am pretty sure this trumps most league benefits of simply having bragging rights.

The program is free to both join and play and is pretty simple to play. The contest will last for the 17 weeks of the season ending on Jan 20, 2012. Each week you would go to the game page and select your lineup based on the player roster.

You select eight players, fielding a team that features one quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, one kicker and one team defense/specialty team. Each week you can use the same or different players as you see fit.

Points are accumulated by a method spelled out in the rules that basically calls for the most points coming from scoring both on offense and defense and you can lose points for fumbles and interceptions. Also yards gained passing and rushing accumulate points.

Defense and specialty teams accumulate points from touchdowns on punt, kickoff, fumble and interception returns as well as sacks safeties and shutouts, among other options. Allowing large amounts of points are negatives to your score.

To win the grand prize a player needs to pick what is called the Perfect Lineup. This means that you need the position player that scored the highest number of fantasy points at each position. For other prizes you need to pick the NFL player and defense/ specialty team for that week.

I can see myself developing an ulcer as some coach brings out the quarterback in the fourth quarter of a late season blowout killing my chances at $1 million. Of course since I have a difficult time separating my emotions from my team it’s likely the rest of the players I have selected will not be at the top of the leader board, but I can always dream!

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NFL Offers a Great Range of Apps for Mobile Users

NFL '12

The first week of the National Football League’s preseason ended last night with a thump as the Dallas Cowboys beat the Oakland Raiders 3-0 in a game that started out like a ball of fire but quickly cooled as time passed.

I was not able to watch the game and since I do not currently use Verizon I could not stream the game over my phone, and I decided not to use the NFL’s site to get the basic about what was going on. Later a friend called and asked if I had seen the run that McFadden had early in the game. I did not and was not willing to watch SportsCenter that late in the evening to catch it.

I did wander over to the NFL’s web site and was amazed at the number of options available for mobile customers, something that seems to have expanded greatly from last year when it seemed that it was Verizon or nothing.

The main point of interest was the breadth of offerings, eight in all, not counting several additional ones that were games. I will not recount all of them here, but several are very worth of downloading on your phone or tablet.

The lead one is the NFL’s official app, NFL’12 that follows all of the games with play by play as they occur. It can be set to provide alerts for scoring and games and has the ability to chat with others while the game is being p

layed. It has full integration with another app from the NFL- NFL.Com’s Fantasy Football so that you can access your team from within this app. Pretty standard stuff but certainly a must for NFL fans.

There are two that stood out for me however. The first was Game Pass, a subscription based app. This has two features, the first being audio pass that enables you to listen to live game broadcasts. Good until Jan.4, 2013 the program also lets you listen to any game from the 2009-2011 season as well. It is currently available for $24.99 A paired down version to follow only your favorite team is also available for $22.99.

The second part is Game Rewind, which lets you watch replays of all the games. In some cases it provides coaches film views of plays as well as the broadcast version. The program is currently $39.99 or for the single team view $34.99. There is also a subscription based app called NFL Preseason Live, designed just for tablets.

Then there is the NFL Mobile from Verizon that permits live streaming video from the NFL Network. There is the already mentioned Fantasy Football Mobile that allows players of the NFL’s Fantasy Football to control their teams from mobile devices. A related app is the Fantasy Cheat Sheet, targeted at the Fantasy Football players.

Baseball has been at the forefront of pushing mobile apps, in my opinion, and I believe that the NFL has significantly closed the gap with the huge array of offerings that it now has available. I will be downloading several to see how well I like them, as well as some of the games to see how much productivity I can kill.

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RotoWire Delivers Fantasy Football Draft Kit 2012 App

RotoWire

The first round of pro football preseason games has just concluded and so naturally many fans minds turn to fantasy football and how they can get that one game changer that will put them over the top in their league and so win boasting rights for the next year.

One good tool to have in your arsenal is the latest sports app from RotoWire, the Fantasy Football Draft Kit 2012, along with the usual selection of preseason magazines, sports web sites and a list of pundits that you believe and disbelieve.

The kit, currently available for iPhones and iPads at Apple’s App Store for $4.99 with an Android version is expected to be available later this week, has been upgraded from last years version with new features and support capabilities.

The app takes a lot of the grunt work out of sorting stats and looking at all key position players, although of

course nothing replaces a good understanding on injuries and team and coaching dynamics.

A user would simply input their leagues scoring and roster settings and the app then goes and creates a projections based on value-based calculations using RotoWire’s 2012 stat projections. It also uses those projections to create cheat sheets that can be used during drafts.

However you do not need to use the rankings that it sets and can manually adjust the rankings to meet your perception of the relative value of players. You can also create a watch list for players that you expect to have a breakout season.

Other features include projected stats for the year as well as players stats from last year when applicable. It will also enable a user to download updated stat projections until the start of the season. It has a number of customized settings as well including the ability to set the number of teams in the draft, modify and set offensive scoring, roster spots, defensive scoring and kicking scoring.

The release of this app is just the tip of the iceberg for RotoWire, which has a number of apps in the queue waiting for release including a Fantasy Football Guide and a Fantasy College Football Draft Kit, so keep your eye on the company or your favorite app store.

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