CBSSports.com has released "2010 World Soccer Challenge" in time for the World Cup. It's free to play, and sadly you get what you pay for. Entrants pick eight teams before the tournament starts. The teams are grouped roughly by quality; entrants pick one team from each group. Your selected teams then get 10 points for a win, 8 for a shootout win, 3 for a draw, 2 for a clean sheet, 2 for a shootout loss, and 1 per goal scored.

And that's it. No re-draft, no selecting individual players, no picking match results, nothing. There's a prize of $5K to the winner, a nice chunk of change, but that's likely recouped multiple times over through ad revenue, click-throughs, etc. And there's only the one prize. If more than one person has the best set of selections (certainly possible: there are 16.2 million combinations, but some of them seem very unlikely to win), they're going to have a random draw.

That's a poor contest. To anyone reading this who says "Give CBS a break", I think that's why I'm being so tough: it's CBS, and I expect a lot better. My local fantasy football league started on CBS; right now I'm playing a private high stakes bases league on that platform. I've always thought the CBS baseball and football stuff runs pretty well, and was well thought out. That's why this lousy soccer contest is such a shock. I wish CBS had spent more than five minutes designing the game.