Week 1 Is Here: Bold Picks, Top Dawgs and Dawg Piles

By: Sugar (2026-09-04)

The clock is ticking down to dirty-dawg.com's 2026 CFCC Week 1! To help get you in the mood, there are 11 total college games this Thursday night and several more tomorrow night. But the only action that you care about is the dirty-dawg action which launches at 11 AM CDT on Saturday. Here is what you need to know:

CFCC Game Form

Week 1 CFCC game form will close at 11 AM Saturday, September 5. Get your picks in by then or you miss out on all of the action. As of this writing, 147 hopefuls have already locked in their selections and those numbers will go way up over the next 40 hours or so. On top of that, 34 groups are formed up with 33 of them gunning to shoot down the 2025 group champion, Stratus-Faction Guaranteed, which is also back to defend it's title. Make sure to get those picks in and there is still time to recruit new blood and create some competitive groups. And if you are up for a real challenge, swing on over to our new contest CFCC-ATS (against the spread) and show off your ability to stick it to Johnny Vegas!

In-Game Features

Once the game form closes Saturday, a wealth of information becomes available giving you the ability to slice and dice your competition's selections for Week 1. Your portal for all of this information begins at the Player Board, where you can see all of the sorry picks from your fellow dirty-dawgers. You will also see game consensus information and breakdowns of picks for each team for each game. On the picks matrix and individual picks pages, you will see a new indication for "Bold" picks, which means the badged pick is at least 2 standard deviations outside of the all-player consensus for that game. (For you non-statisticians, that means the pick is a large deviation from what the rest of the player field thinks.) More on this below.

While the dirty-dawg games of the week are underway, make sure to fire up the CFCC Gameday Dashboard where you will find live game updates of all Division 1 games underway with the added bonus of tracking your weekly score minute by minute and final by final. This year we are even going to show you how the rest of the field is doing, live as games unfold! That's it. No splash ads, no ads that fire-up with blaring audio while you are trying to watch another game, just college football scores and dirty-dawg scores, updated automatically through the day, night and (sometimes) early morning hours. And while all of that is going on, there will be a live dirty-dawg member to member chat available to make a point or talk some trash.

Post-Games Things to Know

Our promise to you here at dirty-dawg.com is to post official contest scores as fast as humanly possible, no matter when the final gun of the final game occurs. Once that happens, you will see weekly and overall scores and see how your selections fared for the week. And remember those bold picks we discussed above? Those will convert to either Top Dawg Picks (if you were right) or Dawg Pile Picks (if you weren't). Of course, you know we will show some special love to the extreme sides of both of these picks on the front page!

The other things you need to know is that any week you finish in the top 10% of the overall standings, you will receive an automated message inviting you to vote in the Dirty-Dawg.com Top 12 poll for the week. If you are good enough to end up on this email list, you will have 24 hours to select your teams before the poll is officially released.

If you are the one that scores the highest score for a given week, you will also receive an email inviting you to take the podium and say whatever you would like to say. Kind of dirty-dawg's version of social media. We will post your incredible and inspirational (or whatever) words right on the front page for all to see. If it's improper (which is hard to do at dirty-dawg.com) we will have to take it down, but we trust that won't be a problem (much). Same deal for the top group each week. If your group scores the highest for the week (highest average player score) the group commissioner will receive an email inviting them to speak for the group. On the front page. Don't be inappropriate.

And finally, we promise this is the last long article we will post about the CFCC side of the house. From this point on, you will only receive late-breaking information that you absolutely need to know (via email) or the usual reminders that go out each week if your picks have not been received.

We are happy you are here and we hope you enjoy the 2026 version of the College Football Confidence Contest! Good luck!!