With the White Sox 1-0 victory over the Twins on Tuesday night, the MLB playoff field is finally set.

Here’s how Bleacher Report’s postseason contest will work:

1) To enter, email your picks for all three rounds, including number of games to Ben Weixlmann at bweixlmann@stlsportscenter.com.  Also predict a World Series MVP, and for a tiebreaker, guess how many combined runs will be scored in the World Series.

For example, an entry email should look like this:

Division Series
Cubs in 3
Brewers in 5
Red Sox in 3
Rays in 5

Championship Series
Cubs in 6
Red Sox in 7

World Series
Red Sox in 5

Tie Breakers
MVP: David Ortiz
Total runs scored in World Series: 25

2)  Point System:
Division Series correct pick = 3
Championship Series correct pick = 6
World Series correct pick = 9
Correct # of games = 1 bonus point (only awarded if correct winner chosen)

Correct MVP prediction = 2 bonus points
Tiebreaker = Closest to total runs scored

3)  Winner gets $100 gift certificate to MLB.com.  Runner up gets B/R tshirt.

4)  Entries must be received by Wednesday at 8pm EST.

5)  Please send all entries to Ben at bweixlmann@stlsportscenter.com.  Address all comments, questions and/or concerns to Trey at trey@bleacherreport.com.  

Good Luck!

Attention Creatures: Bleacher Report at long last has a true home for your articles about the site itself and its wonderful Community.

The section is called BR Chatter, and it can be found in the menu bar on the top of the front page—so rest assured that articles you assign to this tag will be seen!

What goes hand in hand with this is a polite request from us that you no longer assign league or team tags to general B/R pieces—this includes articles which give tips, encouragement, or thanks to the network’s writers, editors, commenters, staff, etc.  Articles that are Community specific can be tagged with both the Community they are referring too and the “BR Chatter” tag.

To some of you, this request may seem like an attempt on our part to limit your audience—this couldn’t be further from the truth.  These type of pieces are what make our Community so unique, and help us greatly in evaluating our product and finding ways to improve it.

That said, it’s important to remember that the average reader comes to Bleacher Report looking sports content.  If when searching for a college football editorial, a reader instead stumble across a manifesto on how site writers can take the Open Source Sports Network to the next level, they may leave Bleacher Report thinking that this isn’t a place for sports consumers.

A very special thanks to everybody who has taken the time to offer feedback and suggestions about Bleacher Report in the form of articles.  This new section of the site will do justice to these efforts and give us all an easily accessible area to discuss the site.

If anyone has questions or comments, feel free to voice your opinion below.

College Football Die Hard Gray Ghost recently published an article which offers advice for garnering recognition within Bleacher Report’s College Football Community.

Upon reading the piece, it’s clear these tips apply to the Bleacher Report Community as a whole, not just College Football.  To all of you aspiring Bleacher Creatures who want to know how to earn their stripes, trust me when I say that this is a must read.

Bleacher Creatures have probably already noticed, but we’ve launched a new design for all league, team, player, and subject pages. The new design features way more articles than the previous one, and also does a better job of dividing the articles into categories to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

We’ve also made the right column of the new design all about the community that drives that page. Right now you’ll see stats on how many people are in the community as well as a selection of the members. The right column is also where Community Leaders in each community will be listed. Clicking “Join Now” in the Community Column adds that tag to your Lineup and makes you a member of that community so you can get updates and participate in all current and future community-specific features.

We’re working on more updates to the site for later this fall that will continue to improve the B/R experience. As always, any and all feedback is appreciated, so feel free to comment below with your thoughts.

Hey everyone,

So Bleacher Report’s founding team was recently named as one of 25 finalists in BusinessWeek’s America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs for 2008.

Our loyal Creatures have done so much for us that it seems absurd to ask for yet another favor, but we’re hoping that you guys might be able to put aside your B/R addictions for two minutes and vote for us.

Winning this thing would be a huge victory for Bleacher Report, and help to further solidify its rightful place in the world of mainstream sports media.  This is definitely not the way we prefer to attract attention—but if it helps the sports media establishment notice our talented writers and thoughtful fan-analysts, we’ll take it.

Some thanks are clearly in order here, given that the feature only mentions four people and that none of this would be possible without the help of many, many more.

Major props to Ryan Alberti, for establishing Bleacher Report’s high quality standards for content early on in the game and overseeing the site’s editorial process as we’ve grown into an article publishing powerhouse the likes of which the world has never seen.

Many thanks as well to our genius web engineers—Axel, Tung, Tyler, and William—for enabling us to turn an idealistic vision into a live website read by millions of people every day.

Shout outs to Trey Bradley and Mike Eagan for helping to develop the Bleacher Report concept in its early stages, and to Aron Glatzer, Jay Middleton, Gracie Leavitt, Emily Fowler, Quinn Slack, Shaun Andrews, and the rest of the hands we’ve brought along since to take us to the top.

To all the Moms and Dads, your support and advice was invaluable.  And thanks for letting us live at home while we bootstrapped this thing.

And of course…a very special thanks to all of you, our dedicated Community.  It’s been a pleasure serving you and we are thrilled to continue working together at making Bleacher Report a household name and revolutionizing the nature of online sports media.

Lastly, I’d like to thank God…and this Bud Light I’m sipping on right now.

Alright, alright, enough—we haven’t even won yet!  Go vote guys!

The Super Bowl Champion New York Giants will tee it up Thursday night, but Bleacher Report’s NFL: The Season, 2008 has already kicked off.

It’s everything you love about the NFL and fantasy football, in the form of a writing contest.

Each week writers are matched up head-to-head. The goal is to collect the more article reads than your opponent by producing high volume, quality NFL content with great headlines.

Throughout the season, NFL community leaders will help track the match-ups, report scores, and update standings. At the end of the regular season, all the division and wild card winners will be placed in a 16-writer post-season bracket, with the Bleacher Report champion crowned on Super Bowl Sunday.

The competition will be fierce, and we’ve got some great prizes lined up for those who separate themselves from the pack. The winner will have their choice of a subscription to NFL Sunday Ticket for next season or an apparel package which includes an authentic jersey, t-shirts, hats, and shorts of their favorite team. Meanwhile, the runner up takes home a jersey of their favorite NFL star.

Here’s the current conference breakdown:

BRC Kneeland

Rob Ohlstrom

Aaron Liebman

Samuel Bell Jr

Michoel Botwinick

BRC Crowe

Jeff Little

Aren Dow

Joseph Budd

Rich Tandler

BRC Smirnoff

Alvin Dominique III

Dan Boone

Tim Seeman

Steve Angliss

BRC Trollope

Robert Lewis

Angel Navedo

Kristopher Green

Matt Gilmartin

BRC Little

Jack Anderson

Chris Nelson

Joe Willett

Peter T Fleischer

BRC Budd

Michael Schlossberg

Dave Trollope

Tom Highway

Ben Weixlmann

BRC Lewis

Sean Crowe

Antonino Buccellato

JW Joffrion

Matthew Browning

BRC Anderson

Jeff Smirnoff

Craig W Garrison Sr

Jameson S Flemin

Owen Munro

BRC Schlossberg

Greg Pitsch

Jacob Sloan

William Berry

Chase Ruttig

BRC Bradley

Rafal Ladysz

Chris Radez

Paul Boye

Jake Perper

Inaki Angulo Marquez

Josh Galligan