Turns out we have 22 Georgian teams and 11 Floridian teams racing in the 2010 Atomic Adventure Race presented by Fuji Bikes.  Well, after looking back at the stats last year, I have come up with an idea for how to compare the rivals this year.  We'll extend the cross-country style scoring to account for the fact that there are twice as many Georgian teams at the race:

• The top 5 placing Floridian teams overall.
• The 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th Georgian teams overall.

The overall rankings of each team above will be added up for each state.  Lowest score wins.  Because there are exactly twice as many Georgian teams as Floridians, this should account for the breadth of the Georgian field versus the Floridian field.

To give you an idea of the contenders, here are my unordered top 5 picks for each state:

Team Florida:

Team Georgia:

Granted, my picking process was by no means scientific, and based largely on folks I know from racing and results.  On the Georgia side, there were three more teams I expect to challenge my picks above.

Now back to the competition:  do I see the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th Georgian teams beat the top 5 Floridian teams?  This one will be close, and will depend largely on the placings of 7th and 9th for Georgia versus 4th and 5th for Florida.

Why?  Because I see the battle for the 1st place slot between the teams going to Georgia, Florida's 2nd beating Georgia's 3rd, and a toss-up between Georgia's 5th and Florida's 3rd.  This will give Georgia a slight advantage for the last 2 slots.  But I'm actually not sure Georgia can do it, as I suspect its 9th team will be far behind Florida's 5th.

The big disruptor in all of this will be other state's teams coming in and in what place.  We'll see how it goes!