The CheckerBoard

After reviewing all of the entries submitted last week for our commitment prediction contest, the winner of the two tickets to UT's recruiting celebration Thursday in Knoxville is ... emalone33.

Tennessee officially is listed with 18 commitments right now on 247Sports, and emalone33 finished with a final score of 17. He correctly predicted all 18 of the Vols' current commitments, including MarQuez North, and also was correct in guessing that UT would lose Dan Skipper by Friday, Feb. 1 at noon Eastern time, which marked the end of the contest. The only commitment emalone33 predicted that wasn't correct was three-star defensive end Jaylen Miller, who many believe is likely to pick the Vols on Wednesday.

All things considered, it was a very impressive effort by emalone33 — certainly worthy of winning the tickets. In fact, I'm almost wondering if he had some inside information that helped him in putting together his list.

There was no prize for anyone other than the first-place finisher, but for those of you who might be interested, here were the top three finishers:

1. emalone33 - 17
2. UTOsby - 15
3. Sam10x - 15

Congratulations to emalone33! We'll be in contact with you today to make sure you still can attend Thursday's recruiting celebration. Assuming you can — and assuming you can confirm that to us by noon Eastern time Monday — the tickets are yours. If we're not able to reach emalone33 or he can't attend the event, then UTOsby will have the next shot at the tickets.

Thanks to everyone for participating! This was a fun contest, and hopefully we'll be able to do more stuff like this in the future. Also, of course, a huge thank-you to tntoak for donating the tickets to the recruiting celebration. That's the only reason we were able to have this contest and giveaway, so thanks again for your generosity in donating the tickets specifically for this purpose — for us to give them away and allow another member of the govols247 family to attend the event.