It’s time to make your picks.

We do this every year … picks contest for high school football, college football and NFL football.

And every year, we think that we’ve pretty much captured the U Pick’Em audience for our contests.

But, every year, we find that the audience is waiting for this contest …. and they’ve brought their friends.

We launched this season’s set of contests last week without much fanfare We sent some e-mails to past participants, and we posted a link on our new sports pages for OU and OSU. But we didn’t spend a lot of time promoting or driving people to the contest. In hindsight, perhaps we should have. We have thousands of participants on all the contests, and pick are being made for Week 1 every hour.

It’s not too late for you. Sign up and play. Invite your friends and form a group.

There’s no rule saying you can’t have fun on NewsOK.com.

We are mere days away from the start of the NCAA Tournament.

You know … the day that your co-workers mysteriously disappear from the office, take looooooong lunches or are on “vacation.”

Side note: I will be out of the office on Thursday and Friday, but it’s a legitimate family trip to the sports ba – er ….  I mean …. Arkansas. Really. I know people in Arkansas. It’ll be good to see them.

But you can see all the coverage on NewsOK.com’s NCAA Tournament coverage page. The coverage is brought to you by Nissan, which is why we have such cool content. We have every thing you will need:

• The national stories
• Printable brackets
• In-depth coverage of the local teams (OU men, OU women and OSU men)
• Contests
• Live scores
• Live chats during the OU and OSU games
• Blogs
• Video highlights

You can also find the latest local stories on you mobile device, the iPhone or the traditional mobile site. That’s what I’ll be using as I drive and visit in …. Arkansas.

Second Side note: If I see any basketball on the TV while in Arkansas, it will be a mere fortunate coincidence. No lie.

Normally, we have one contest for our basketball enthusiasts.

Not this year. This year, we have three.

Why not, we figured. We always get a lot of our users to sign up for these games, so we might as well try three games. It doesn’t really take any more time to play three games and have opportunities to win three big prizes (all of our games have at last a large national prize).

• With our U Pick’Em game, you can win a $1,000,000 by picking all games correctly.
• With our Dell Sports Game of the Century contest, you can win a $100,000,000 grand prize. Yes, that’s the correct number of zeros.
• With our Athletix Nation Bracket Challenge, you can win a trip for four to Las Vegas during the NCAA tournament.

(Side note, if you win $100 million from a NewsOK contest, I get half …. it’s in the small print).

OK. That last part isn’t true, but it would be appreciated.

(Everything else in this post was absolute fact.)

I am playing every game. I’m just waiting for the tournament brackets to be chosen.

And as usual, when I get one upset picked correctly, I’ll tell everyone I know that I picked that upset and that I knew it all along. I won’t, however, mention the other 23 games in the first round that I did not know all along.

I didn’t see a second of the show. I missed the whole thing. Didn’t matter, though. I got the full recap on NewsOK.com, thanks to George Lang’s StaticBlog. Good stuff there — great images, great commentary and lots of comments from our visitors.

Now that the Grammy’s are  over, it’s time to focus on the Oscars in13 days. You can get focused right here on NewsOK. We have all the coverage, and it’s going to start getting serious in the next few days.

If you really want to see what you know about the world of movies, join our Oscars contest. Make your picks on all the big awards that will be given out on Feb. 22.

But the coolest thing about our Oscars coverage will be the night of the event. We will have a live chat during the show – our experts will be giving their thoughts about the awards as they are handed out. And Brandy McDonnell (BAM) will be blogging live, as well.

I won’t miss the live show on Feb. 22. With NewsOK, it will be more than a mere televised event.

Three things are always true during the college football bowl season.

1 – College football fans will comments on message boards and call in to talk radio to demand a college football playoff (I have my own theory, circa 1999).

2 – College football fans will complain about the terrible selection of bowl games.

3 – College football fans will make their picks for every bowl game, then proceed to watch all of them.

You can make your picks and compete with other NewsOK users through our U Pick’Em 2008 College Bowl Game Contest.

It’s OK to enjoy the bowl game and still wish that we had a true playoff system that still wouldn’t de-emphasize the regular season.

Sign up and enjoy. We won’t tell anyone.