Coming close to correctly picking the tiebreaker score in the weekly Deseret News Grid Picks contest is important, as Ann Marie Taylor of West Valley City can attest.
Taylor was one of three contestants who correctly guessed 11 winners of last week's 12 games, missing only Louisville's win over Pittsburgh. She earned first-prize honors by missing the selected Utah-UTEP tiebreaker score by three points - actual score of 37-23 versus a guessed score of 35-24.For her efforts, Taylor wins the $100 prize and becomes eligible along with the other weekly winners in the grand-prize contest - a $25,000 award for the participant who correctly predicts halftime and final scores of the BYU-Utah game.
The other two contestants who had 11 correct - Andrea Miller of Salt Lake City and Virginia Johnson of Spanish Fork - are the first of 10 runners-up who receive Deseret News "Sports Page" T-shirts.
The other eight runners-up come from 19 who picked 10 right, the tiebreaker score used again. They include Brent Harmon of Sandy, Hayden Larsen of West Valley City, Dean Edwards of Heber City, Wendy Higley of Orem, Stephen Kirk of Murray, Ken Hufford of Salt Lake City, Bob Huish of Provo and Darryl Syverson of Salt Lake City.
The breakdown of the total 1,319 entries into number of games correctly picked: 11 - 3; 10 - 19; 9 - 11; 8 - 226; 7 - 330; 6 - 306; 5 - 188; 4 - 88; 3 - 42; 2 - 6; 1 - 0.
In the celebrity contest, the Deseret News and KSL Radio twosomes each finished 8-4. The DesNews duo of Lee Benson and Doug Robinson still holds a three-game season advantage over the KSL Radio pair of Chris Tunis and Jim Braden.