Okay, time to reveal how everyone fared out with all that soothsaying over the weekend’s NFL football.

Let’s start with the Setanta competition, for which one winner for every round of the NFL will get to enter a draw for a year’s subscription to Setanta Sports on satellite.

Having closely perused all of the Week 1 entries, we have a Week 1 winner who is Daire Eagney.  Daire didn’t predict the exact result of the Dublin/Armagh game but he did get the margin of victory right and he was closer to the correct scoreline than anyone else was.  He also, somewhat eerily, had Down to get 3-7 against us and so if it had gone to a tie-break (which it didn’t), he’d definitely have seen off all the other challengers there.  Well done, Daire, and thanks to everyone else who entered.  There’ll be six other chances to make the shortlist for the draw over the coming weeks and I’ll be giving plenty of advance notice ahead of the Week 2 competition if anyone is interested in joining the fun.

Right, onto the other bit of sport, which is the mini-league hosted, as ever, by those good people at facetheball.com.  There were a fair few odd results at the weekend, what with the two draws, Laois beating Meath and Monaghan walloping Galway, not to mention that topsy-turvy clash between Cork and Kerry so there were plenty of chances for everyone to slip up.

There’s a very big field in the mini-league this year – forty in fact, which is also the maximum number that they let go to post in the Grand National – so in the interests of efficiency I’ve decided that what I’ll post here after every week’s action is a leaderboard of the top twenty.  That way, it’ll be easier to concentrate on who is involved in the shake-up while those unfortunate wretches languishing in final few places won’t get held up to public ridicule.  I think that’s what you call a win-win outcome.

As you can see, Martin Heffernan and yengae are off like a pair of proverbial rockets in first place with a few of us in the chasing group after them.  Last year’s winner of the NFL mini-league, MickC, is tucked in nicely in ninth and in a good position to launch a run at back-to-back titles.  I was a bit surprised to see myself so high in the table, as I got caught out by both Meath and Tyrone as well as the two draws, but I did have both Cork and Monaghan in addition to the other obvious ones.  That’s if any kind of results in February can correctly be described as obvious.