Last Friday, I announced that we have a four-way tie in the Mathews Z7 contest. Buddyboy25, Ikedogg, mwmrtn, and taylor1 each correctly guessed the actual, to-the-inch, gross-score total of 685 inches. I also posted a tie-breaker buck—but that deer, unfortunately, proved to be a little too well-known, as Hank111 rightly pointed out.

So here is a new buck for our Final Four (as buckhunter has dubbed them) to guess at. Okay finalists, we’ll give you two looks at this one:

There have been some questions popping up about exactly how we will determine a winner for the Mathews Z7 contest, so let me break it down. In the initial post (and in an early comment on the last post), I explained that your gross-score guesses for each buck should be to the inch--and that is how I will tally the four bucks’ actual scores—to the inch—to get the winning total. “To the inch” means fractionals are simply disregarded. Guessing a buck’s score from a photo is tough enough, so I didn’t want you to have to worry about fractionals. Still, many of you have given fractionals.

Way back in 19 and 58, Winchester introduced a new cartridge called the .284 (which was its bore diameter) designed to bring .270-style ballistics to its hideously inaccurate Model 100 autoloader and its handsome, but nearly as inaccurate, Model 88 lever action. The round was a commercial failure, but it was a remarkable design, and while the public yawned at the .284, wildcatters went mad with joy and necked the thing up, down, and sideways.