Protect Your Unit, Week 11 Results: Big Money

(DISCLAIMER: This contest is for entertainment purposes only. No actual money is being wagered.)

That's one of my favorite music videos, borne from the brief window of time when MTV had both style and substance. It's Rush, but you can see the influence of "Money For Nothing" and other videographic excesses of the first half of the 1980s. Soon after, the network would venture into half-hour non-music shows, and then The Real World, and it was rapidly downhill from there.

What does this have to do with last week's games? Oh yeah, two of our players found the big money this week.

LeavittTown made a huge, risky bet on Stanford to beat mighty Oregon straight-up. $264.50 at +340 money line works out to $899.30. That vaults him from the middle of the pack into first place. That's definitely the pick of the year so far.

And that's not even the big win of the week. Also pushing people around and pulling out the rug was iwaswrongabouthowell, who won a 3-team parlay at $150, for a net of $900 -- 70 cents more than LeavittTown's play. Texas, Florida State, and Auburn all covered, though Texas needed overtime to dispose of West Virginia. As he explained the bet to me: "I do not feel I have truly embraced the debauched nature of this game until I have tried to make up for a bad week with an ill-advised parlay that involves both Mack Brown and a 35 point spread." For betting a crazy three-team longshot, and winning, IWWAH claims Floyd's Money Team Most Degenerate Bet of the Week.

The Randolph and Mortimer Spite Bet of the Week goes to zls44, for putting $6.66 on Syracuse-Maryland. It's understandable that a UConn fan would hold a grudge against those two schools. But inflicting the Mark of the Beast on them, on a day where they were trying to right a historical wrong, is admirably mean. Honorable Mention to CedSaidZed for betting $1.01 on hapless Southern Miss to beat Skip Holtz and Louisiana Tech. The extra fake cent was a nice touch. As if this pairing demanded something above the standard wager.

Your up-to-the-second standings are as follows:

Looking ahead: Tuesday gives us Buffalo-Toledo, a good candidate for zany high-scoring MACtion. Wednesday gives us the two best teams in the MAC, Ball State-Northern Illinois. Clemson hasn't lost a random ACC game yet; they host Georgia Tech on Thursday night. Speaking of which, Miami at Duke is suddenly interesting now that UM has lost two straight. The winner stays tied for first in the division race. Michigan State plays at Nebraska, which will likely decide the winner of one of the Big Ten's poorly-named divisions. Houston plays Louisville, Florida tries to salvage a bowl trip at South Carolina, and the glamour game of the week is Georgia-Auburn.