Here at Pickwatch we love a good audit. OHHH YES. A LOVELY AUDIT. Some people find them tedious, time consuming, a complete ball-ac... look, they really are a pain, a-columbo-season-3-peter-falk-dvd-review-PDVD_031but they're necessary, particularly as there is no standardized system within the sports media world for this type of thing. More on that over the off-season.

So with that in mind, our week 6 and week 16 audits have picked up a couple of issues with how ESPN has calculated their totals for their experts. This is particularly important as it is harming the win/loss columns for some of their better pickers at the top of the standings such as KC Joyner, their own fans and a few others who our readers are interested in following.

Here are things we noticed up to this point (and this is as much for our auditing purposes as your own!):

Week 6:

Ok this one is incredibly confusing, and predictably, it is associated with the tie between Cincinnati and Carolina.

As you can see here, somehow, the basic calculation of correct picks vs incorrect picks is completely wrong, but only for a few experts. Let's start with Keyshawn Johnson (oh great).

Keyshawn has 9 correct picks in week 6: IND, BAL, DEN, GB, SD, DAL, ARI, PHI, SF. Count 'em! 9! Of course, Keyshawn has been credited with 10. Do we know why? No we do not.

'But what about Mike Golic!?' I hear nobody cry. Well, Mike Golic is also in the same spot, with 10 correct picks (BAL, DEN, DET, NE, CLE, GB, SD, ARI, PHI, SF) and has been given credit for an extra pick at 11-4

The same applies for Tom Jackson (10-4 becomes 11-4). We're not going to list his picks, because it's getting tedious now and we've got more important week 16 things to do.

The common theme? Of course, they all picked the Panthers in the tied game, and presumably, ESPN's system - despite ties occurring on average once a year these days - isn't clever enough to just disregard the game entirely. As a result, these guys will all end up with -1 pick, which we're happy to explain should anyone query.

Now let us never speak of the 'tie' again.

Week 12:

The Buffalo/NYJ game being moved to Detroit has messed up the ESPN system, as you can see here. We're still not 100% how their back-end works, but you would assume it is automated in some way. Unfortunately, they've diddled (thanks Frank Reynolds) Joyner, their own fans and a bunch of others out of a legit Bills pick.

Now, we had entered the picks for that game before the schedule was re-arranged, so we always had a record of this. At one point, ESPN removed it from their schedule completely, which has probably caused a database error at their end. As a result, some experts may be out by 1, but we're keeping the correct scores as part of our records.

If you want examples, why not check out our individual expert pages by clicking their name on the main page - here's Ron Jaworski's page - which allows you to see all of that person's yearly picks.

So that's a little heads up from us as to why some of the more prominent experts may not always look the same as they do on their own websites. We're not here as moral arbitrators, but we do try to just keep the correct score, even when others don't!

As a result of these discrepancies, we'll be starting a couple of new features up next year to show how picks have changed and where discrepancies may have occurred. This also gives experts a chance to contact us (as some do) to amend their scores where we need to, as was the case with Gregg Rosenthal today, who kindly emailed us to advise some of his picks had been changed last moment and not picked up by us (sorry Gregg!).

We've done a quick audit today and checked many experts, however if you do spot anything, just drop us a line and we'll look into it. We appreciate all of your help, support and every visit, click and general nice email we receive. It really makes a difference to us and spurs us on to add more features as quickly as possible.