Mandel Mailbag

For the 2nd time in my life, my question made it to Stewart Mandel's Mailbag. I received a prestigious honor of being the closing question.

If you listen to his podcast, I have had my questions read a handful of times on there too. Always fun to have your question answered.

I would recommend writing to Stewart, even when my questions don't make it into the mailbag, he has still spent time to personally write me back.

Armchair Superstar Soccer Pool

 As you all may recall, we did a draft and a pool for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. I know I had a lot fun with it and was planning on doing something similar this year for the 2012 Euro Cup which starts June 6th. I started doing some prep work on it and realized, there’s only 16 teams in the field, half the amount of the World Cup.

So this creates a problem. If we do a 8 man pool like we did for the World Cup, each person will only get two teams. Part of me likes this as you will throw your support behind these two teams then if you attention was split into 4 teams. However, this also increasing the likelihood of having ties in the group stage portion of the event.

 4 people picking 8 teams decrease the potential winning and the difficulty of winning. Of these two, I don’t know which I like better.

 Two other options I have considered is......

 Having each country able to be drafted twice. This way we can keep the pool at 8 people with 32 teams. However, this creates problems with splitting the Euro Cup Prize.


 Doing a draft, where each person can pick 1 team from the 4 pots of teams that qualified. This would only be for the group stage and not for the elimination stage. That part I don’t know what to do with.


As you can see, I don’t know what I want to do. Let me know your thoughts.