Oh the things you find while Blingo–ing. Since it’s that time of year again for the Super Bowl, with it comes: the backyard-BBQ par­ties, the trash-talking between teams, the millions-of-dollars-worth of bets, funny & cre­ative com­mer­cials and last but not least, the office Super Bowl Pool. A cou­ple of friends and I have been doing this for the past cou­ple of years now. Too bad, no one wanted to do it this year. Don’t know why?

Mean­while, hav­ing the feel­ing of just try­ing to get into the spirit of the Super Bowl (even though the teams weren’t my pick from the start of the sea­son), I asked around MA to see if we are doing one this year. Turns out there wasn’t even one for last year’s. So, I just vol­un­teered not remem­ber­ing how John-John facil­i­tated it.

Any­ways, with a call to J2 and some Blingo-ing, I found some tem­plates. The best one I found was through:

Num Sum. Easy, Sharable Web Spread­sheets. Keep your records, lists and spread­sheets in one place online. Eas­ily slice, dice and share with others.

It’s FREE. You have the abil­ity to share with friends and fam­ily that don’t even have an account but with they just won’t be able to update the sheet directly and save it. You may also inter­act with a group or team, and share a sheet for col­lab­o­ra­tion. It’s a nice, FREE and great web app.

Other obser­va­tions that I found while study­ing and using Num Sum was it’s home­page lay­out. It strikes sim­plis­tic sim­i­lar­i­ties with the very-outstanding Base­camp in its early days. Why not, right? Why not fol­low some­thing that has done very well in performance.

So, after spend­ing some time to get every­one to join in on the fun, I man­aged to get a 10x10 (100 squares) Pool filled out . The pot is big—$500. It’s $5 per square and you get $75 for the First, Second/Half and the Third. Then a humon­gous sum of $275 for the Fourth/Final, no OT. I was get­ting wor­ried Wednes­day night (after send­ing the email on Mon­day morn­ing about the Pool), that only half of the Pool was taken. But alas, every­one came through to chip in for a cou­ple of squares and com­plete it eventually.

After hav­ing indi­vid­u­als pick from a som­brero (lit­er­ally, the one from Chevy’s), I got the fol­low­ing num­bers (Steelers/Seahawks): 5/1, 3/5, 5/4 and 4/7. The 5s might be hard to get but there is very great hope on the jewel “4/7″ combo: 14 & 7, 24 & 7 and 24 & 17 to name a few. I can’t wait. This should be a fun way for MA to do some­thing together. Good times.

Update
Here’s the com­plete Pool. Ain’t it col­or­ful? Damn skippy, it took a while try­ing to get the same background-color when some­one wanted to add a square. I hope Num Sum adds the fea­ture to do some kind of eye­drop­per tool to just pick the same color, font-style, size or what have you.