The PCS Story

The creation of the PCS Game dates to before the turn of the millennia.

In 1998, several years after I graduated UT Knoxville with an Engineering degree, the school was experiencing some championship-level status thanks to the prior Peyton Manning years and the limelight season of Tee Martin and the defense leadership of Al Wilson. A handful of us Alumni and other UT fans ventured to the college football National Championship game in Tempe, AZ in January of that school year. We watched the Vols beat Florida State in the Fiesta Bowl. We capped off an undefeated season with a 23-16 score and a place in history as the first BCS Champions.

That next season, our group, high off the undefeated year before, kept in touch during football season via telephone or email. We would banter on why the Vols would win or not win, and even tried to predict and defend our choice of the exact score of the game. I eye-balled the score predictions against the final score and – for fun – picked a winner. So predicting the exact score became a regular thing. We began a tradition of email exchanges about the upcoming game, folks would predict an exact score, and I would pick a winner-based on how close someone got to the final score.

It was fun, and it worked, …until the 2001 season, when I eye-balled the scores to pick the prediction champion after that devastating loss to LSU in the SEC championship. I can’t remember who I picked, but whoever it was didn’t sit well with the others in our group. I sent out the results of the prediction contest, and one of the Chrises chimed back, “[How] you figure? My score was closer.”

That was a great question. Who really picked the best score, and what was the criteria used to calculate the closest prediction?

So, out came the excel spreadsheets, the formulas, and years of perfecting The PCS game. We created elements of a winning prediction-based on Favorite Team Score, Opposing Team Score, the Spread, and Total Score. We started with simple formulas, then started to add things like penalizing players for predicting against the Vols (thanks, Jennie), and even made Vegas a player in the game each week.

By the 2003 football season, we had pretty much settled on the components that go into picking a winner for the week, and for the season overall. Every player was ranked weekly, and for the season. Our group of less than ten eventually grew to twelve. Then fifteen. We started adding wives, brothers-in-law, and even the kids joined in as they got older. Eventually I started the tradition of celebrating the season overall winner with a PCS Plaque!Since those early days we have crowned 19 PCS Champions.

These days we are up to over 30 players and growing, and we have now added a student group at the University (the Campus PCS) and plan to spread the fun of the PCS to other colleges.