After sending the 254Eats Bracket Challenge ballots to Florida to have them certified by experts, we're comfortable declaring a winner.
No, just kidding. But we do have a winner. Baris tallied 18,762 votes in the final to edge George's by 17 percent. That completed Baris's impressive run of wins against Leal's, Shorty's, Kitok's and Captain Billy Whizzbang's — all worthy opponents — to reach the final.
On Monday night, I thought Shabazz Napier was going to say "Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the hungry Huskies and we're going to eat at 254Eats champion Baris!" But he went a different direction with it.
We have a couple of thoughts looking back on a fun month.
First and foremost, we had a blast watching the votes and seeing how many people participated. We estimate somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 WacoFork fans participated, and that's taken from unique visitors numbers and accounting for multiple devices. We're not afraid to brag that we topped 100,000 page views for the first time during this promotion. So thank you to everyone who got into it and voted.
Of course, that leads to the possibility that the voting mechanism was imperfect. We're sure it was. But we also feel like, even though the one-vote-per-hour rule could be circumvented, all the restaurants still had an equal opportunity to win. We'll try to fine tune the prospect next year.
Oh yeah, we're going to roll it out again in 2015, Lord willing and the creeks don't rise. So be thinking of restaurants to nominate. In the meantime, we'll have a new promotion coming your way real soon. Stay tuned.
