It's Miss America time in Atlantic City! Here's how to win your pool

ATLANTIC CITY — All hail Miss Louisiana. She won a swimsuit preliminary and she's a ventriloquist. Could there be a more formidable Miss America combination heading into Sunday's pageant itself?

My notes during Laryssa Bonacquisti's walk down the iconic Boardwalk Hall runway in a bikini Thursday night consisted of: "She's flouncy. Personality. Stilettos."

Look for her in the top 15 at least, if only because puppets are in vogue on reality shows. Just ask Wells, the puppet-wielding bartender on ABC's Bachelor in Paradise, whose host, Chris Harrison, returns to Atlantic City to lend his unique brand of overseeing truly odd reality television shows to the mother of them all: The Miss America Pageant, which airs on ABC at 9 p.m. Sunday. ESPN's Sage Steele is cohost.

Never mind that other great American matchup of Giants vs. Cowboys also airing Sunday night. Or the magnificent American women who dominated the semifinals of the U.S. Open Tennis Championships during pageant week, a true talent competition. (Fun fact: U.S. Open semifinalist CoCo Vandeweghe's grandmother Colleen Kay Hutchins was Miss America 1952.)

Miss America, which managed to snag a $12 million multiyear subsidy from the State of New Jersey this year even as its ratings dipped and its appeal within Atlantic City flatlined, will give it another go in its ancestral 1921 birthplace. There's still fun to be had. Just being able to write, "Miss West Virginia did hip hop," for starters. And scholarship money, though not as much as they once claimed, and that John Oliver famously debunked.

This year's contestants seem to lack the wackiness of year's past, when a Miss Vermont conducted erupting science experiments on stage, and Miss Puerto Rico gave a monologue in which she morphed into a snake in the garden, or the bold statements of a Miss Kansas tattoo, or the first openly gay contestant, last year's Miss Missouri. Ah, for the days when two Miss North Carolinas showed up for battle.

Miss New Jersey Kaitlyn Schoeffel gets sawed in half when she travels with her boyfriend, mentalist Wayne Hoffman, but her talent for Miss America, alas, is dance. Miss Pennsylvania Katie Schreckengast plays alto sax with the Penn State Marching Band and represented with a "WE ARE!" Penn State nod while on stage. (Let's hope by Sunday night's end, SHE IS! Miss America. )

So go ahead and make your picks. I've made mine (see below). Here's what to watch for Sunday night, and what to dread. (Let's hope outgoing Miss America Savvy Shields does not reprise her extended prelim riff on a spray-tan mishap.)

CORNY STATE INTROS

 Cringe-worthy state introductions to kick off the pageant are always a highlight. But during preliminary nights this year, they were in short supply, as the contestants seemed to have been encouraged to identify themselves by their majors (mostly broadcast journalism as usual).

But while some simply dived in and threw some grad-school shade at the communications majors — we get it, Miss North Dakota, you went to Brown, and OK, Miss New Hampshire, you're enrolled at Columbia, Miss North Carolina is at Johns Hopkins, and someone's going to law school — but the Miss A's who won me over were the ones who were sneaking a few embarrassing dad jokes into the academic-cred droning.

Miss Maine came up with this classic Miss America obscurity: "I'm from the state that produces 99 percent of the nation's toothpicks. Hoping to be your pick tonight."

Miss Louisiana is from the state that "loves to catch crawfish and Mardi Gras beads but never caught the crown."

Miss D.C. said she was from the home of "Twitter's best customer."

Miss Wyoming says she's from the place where "cowboys are hot, but summers are not."

The winner was definitely Miss Minnesota, who inexplicably began to announce herself as a registered nurse, then stopped and said she was, actually, not a registered nurse. "I'm Miss Minnesota and I make mistakes," she finished up. Now there's a platform we can all relate to. (She later won talent for playing Gershwin on piano.)

MISS DIAGNOSIS  I am not being flip, that is really how I typed what Miss Colorado Meredith Winnefeld cited as the cause of her being blind in her right eye during her on-stage question Wednesday night in prelims. Sorry, Miss Colorado, keep holding the medical field accountable for its mistakes (see above not-an-RN Miss Minnesota). Winnefeld is a baton twirler, another great pageant-y talent, and being a baton twirler who can see out of only her left eye makes her especially impressive. She gets through to the top 15 in my book.  Go, Miss Diagnosis!

PLATFORM CONFESSIONALS Miss Wisconsin's platform is Promoting Civil Discourse, and McKenna Collins plans to take that right to the speaker of the House, Mr. Wisconsin Paul Ryan, in a meeting next month. Miss Maine wants a career in politics and was inspired by her senator Susan Collins. Miss Oregon studied Arabic in college and believes Americans need to listen to their neighbors' stories, "regardless of what country they came from." Miss Utah experienced social anxiety as a child. Miss Oklahoma's platform is bridging the cultural divide, and she said that as a child she felt "too black for the white kids and too white for the black kids."

But the most affecting platform story was definitely from Miss Tennessee Caty Davis, who described three generations of addiction in her family, including her father, who committed suicide three years ago. A bit of whiplash after Miss Hawaii's platform of urging kids to brush and floss, but powerful.

ONE LONE SPORTY SWIMSUIT IN A SEA OF BIKINIS Hello, Miss Oregon Haley Emery, Arabic speaker and multicultural borrow-a-cup-of-sugar-er! Miss Oregon stood out in the swimsuit competition of skimpy bikinis by wearing a bright-red sporty type of swimsuit top. She told N.J.com that she is trying to move the pageant past the bikini fixation. A former intern with the State Department, she's active with refugee resettlement and wants a career in global politics, a mission as challenging as ending Miss America bikini culture.

TALENT STANDOUTS Ah, for the days when Kira Kazantsev won Miss America by playing red Solo cups. This year's were pretty conventional. Miss New Jersey has a lot of talents: She won the "Price Is Right" Showcase Showdown and she gets sawed in half by her boyfriend. Talent! But for Miss America, she went with a jazz dance to "Shut Up and Dance." Miss Vermont is a pilot but went with American Sign Language for her talent.  Miss California played piano in an outfit with really weird rose appliques.

Other than that, the usual Whitney attempters, American Idol classics, middle-school tumbling routines, Bollywood fusion (a recent pageant staple), and some genuinely accomplished instrumentalists (Miss Minnesota on the piano, Miss Utah on the violin). Lots of opera, including Miss Iowa, who also does CrossFit. Miss Hawaii was off message with a dance routine to "I Want To Be a Rockette." No, you want to be Miss America.

And oh yes, Miss West Virginia Tamia Hardy did hip hop. (And, naturally, Miss Louisiana the ventriloquist snagged Night 3 talent prelim.)

MY PICKS FOR THE TOP 15: Texas, Minnesota, Utah, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Tennessee, Maine, Nevada, Iowa, South Carolina, California, Florida, Georgia, and Missouri.

WINNER: If they don't fall for the ventriloquist in the bikini, or the blind-in-one-eye baton twirler, or the gravitas and eloquence of Miss Tennessee, who also did a decent Whitney Houston song, they will pick Miss Texas Margana Wood, who won swimsuit preliminary and is from Houston.