Finally, it is time to start talking about some real football as the Middle Tennessee State Blue Raiders are just five days away from visiting Ross-Ade Stadium. I already have a rival blogger interview lined up for tomorrow, with a game preview on Wednesday and Big Ten Preview coming on Thursday.
The first announcement of the week is a new feature that is an opportunity to give back to you, the reader for being such a great member of this community. SBNation will soon be launching a new and improved T-shirt store called Gameday Depot where you can buy custom shirts. You can even contact me with a design idea and I can do my best to upload it so it can be printed.
In conjunction with that,, Gameday Depot (pardon our dust) is providing a $50 gift certificate to the season-long winner of the 2011 Rocky Top Talk College Football Pick 'Em Pool and $10 gift certificates to one winner each week. We've polished up the official rules of the contest, but the abbreviated version is that you can't win more than one pool across the SBN network (other sites are doing this as well) so don't even bother entering other sites' pools, you can't win more than once in any given 30 day period (except that winning a weekly contest at any time doesn't disqualify you from also winning the grand prize), and tiebreakers will be used to preclude ties. H&R official rules are right here.
Here is a link to the Yahoo Group for our Pick 'em league. Just drop me an e-mail if you're interested and I will send you an invite. (UPDATE: This may help more. The Group ID# is (15442) and the Password (boilers).)