An NFL game at Wembley Stadium, UK, in 2010. Courtesy Mark Botham - Creative Commons license

Our local community sponsors a weekly pick of the 16 football matches that take place every week. For a bit of fun, quite unexpectedly, we decided to join the party and make our picks using Tarot cards, thinking this would give us the opportunity to study Tarot "algorithms" or patterns. Old story ? Been done before ? We don't care - it hasn't been done by us.

Our approach is to take a completely naïve attitude to the project. We do not study the teams; we do not watch the games; we avoid sports news as much as possible. We also have no financial interest at all; we don't bet on the games.

At the beginning of each week, that is, on Wednesday evening, we take the list provided by our community and we draw two major-arcana cards, one representing each team. The list includes a point spread between the teams. We take a naïve attitude about that, too, and we don't look at the point spread until the game is over and we are entering the scores into our spreadsheet and evaluating whether our guess was correct or not. And how can you call it anything but a guess ?

It was during our first draw, having made one pick, that we decided that we should use only major-arcana cards. We are new to this kind of prognostication so experienced practitioners may have issues with our method. One benefit is that the major arcana comprise 22 cards - a very reasonable set that will help with comparisons and evaluations later. The object, of course, is simply to learn as we go - and to assemble data to test how well a Tarot-informed guess fares.

At the time we are posting this there has been one complete week of competition and we are in the middle of the second week of competition, which will end on this coming Monday night, September 21.

First week
We took turns shuffling the cards and holding them out so that the other person could pull the two cards. We turned the cards over and looked at which card was representing which team. Based only on our knowledge of the character of each card we made a decision about which team would be victorious. We'll report details of our results at the end of the season but we appear to be off to a good start.

During Week One we noticed two matches in which the Wheel of Fortune was involved. In the first match Fortune came up against the Devil, with a three-point spread favoring Fortune's team. In that match Fortune's team won by 28 points. In the second match Fortune came up against the Fool, with a 2.5 spread favoring the Fool. Fortune's team won that contest by 17 points. These are large wins by NFL standards.

Another interesting point is that there were three matches where the team lost the game but because of the point spread they won the match. In all three instances the team that lost the game but won the match was designated by the World card.

Second week
We obviously cannot report second week results yet, but we did notice some odd behavior during our draw on Wednesday night. We had a lengthy conversation during the first week's draw about how to interpret a match where the Fool or the Wheel of Fortune was involved. During the second week draw the Fool or the Wheel of Fortune, either one or the other, appeared in the first four draws that we made. It was a bit uncanny.

Our thoughts about this take us into the world of astrology where we are in the middle of a period of instability. Not only is there an aspect between the Sun and the Moon's nodes which peaks on September 25, but Mercury stationed on the night of the first match of the week (Thursday, September 17) and will be retrograde during the weekend period of competition. (It will go direct in October.) Our tentative projection about this is that this week will be an unusual one in the league, and there may be unexpected victories and unusual events. One would expect the passing game to suffer.

Evaluation
As we go along we'll make micro-evaluations of things we notice along the way; we'll save an overall evaluation for mid-season and post-season.