Great Moments in Pool History - 2002

2002 - an Entry Form is Born

In our lucky 13th contest, the commissioners decided to go digital. With our entry form, at least. For two years, we'd had an optional computerized entry form, but it was basically a fill-in document. In 2002, we went whole hog (though totally not Razorback). After consulting computer experts from all over the globe (well, actually we consulted one commissioner from the privacy of his living room), we came up with a version of the very entry form we still use today.

There were those who complained about the newfangled form, mostly about how we'd have nothing left to write about in our newsletters (this was still six years before we took the further technological leap of converting our newsletter system to blog posts). Prior to 2002, a large percentage of our newsletters were devoted to entrants hilariously misspelling team names, picking the same team twice (sometimes more than twice), forgetting to choose conference champions, or miscounting the number of teams they chose at large (sometimes too many, mostly too few). With all that taken away, the critics complained, what in the world would we write about?

Our contestants answered at the top of their electronic lungs, picking eleven (11) illegal wildcards (out of 120 entrants). It's a record that still stands.