What today is known as dirty-dawg.com Sports Confidence Contests emerged out of a simple college football pickem contest played by a handful of Atmospheric Science graduate students at Texas Tech University in the late 1980s. As these students graduated, many of them went on to real jobs (kind-of) at the National Weather Service (NWS) in Lubbock, Texas where the contest continued to be played on paper.

Around this same time, a similar contest for professional football was being played at the National Severe Storms Forecast Center, which today is known as the Storm Prediction Center. That contest had the unique angle of placing confidence values on each winning team. This confidence concept was applied by the NWS Lubbock guys to their local college football contest and many meteorologists that worked at that office enjoyed the college football confidence contest through the early to mid 1990s.

Eventually, upper management took pity on these weather and football prognosticators and promoted them to positions in other offices. Wanting to continue with the contest across the country at different NWS offices, a system was developed to play the contest via personal email so everyone that wanted to, could continue to participate. As Internet connectivity became common in the mid to late 1990s and web technologies evolved, it was decided that the best way to continue the contest was via the Internet and we went online in 1999! That's right, we were online in the 20th Century!

So, what's with the name, dirty-dawg.com? Well, the online concept was born at National Weather Service Detroit/Pontiac where the founders were looking for a contest name. At that time, the term 'dirty dog' was used to describe somebody that did something funny, or envious or cool. Some of us would say, "you dirty dog", in a friendly manner, to indicate that we liked whatever they did. So, in the absence of anything better, we wanted to call the contest "dirty dog". The problem was, "dirtydog.com" and "dirty-dog.com" were already taken from the limited domain names available at the time. So, we had to go with "dirty-dawg.com" and as far as we know, dirty-dawg.com has lasted a lot longer than the original dirty-dog.com did! And somewhere along the line we opened the contest up to anyone that wanted to play, instead of limiting it to a bunch of meteorologist nerds, although meteorologist is still the most represented profession among players.

Today, dirty-dawg.com has been on the web for over 25 years and is still maintained and operated by a handful of meteorologists that prefer to hide behind pen names. A fun fact is that the standard of referring to football weeks as Week 1, Week 2, etc is a dirty-dawg original concept. As far as we know, there was no other sports website or media outlet using that terminology before dirty-dawg.com did. Maybe we stole the idea from some other company and just don't remember.

Anyhow, dirty-dawg.com is a multi-national conglomerate (considering Texas as its own country) that provides the best free Sports contests on the Internet. At dirty-dawg.com you have to be accurate AND confident. Forget the spread and forget the fantasy. Here at dirty-dawg.com you play the real games and you play them straight up. Who wants to worry about teams winning by a certain margin? It's a drag and takes away from the the true spirit of athletics. Try us and you will never go back to those other dogs.