Protect Your Unit, Week 5 Results: Please Allow Me To Bump Thee

(DISCLAIMER: This contest is for entertainment purposes only. No actual money is being wagered. Not by us, anyway. The wagers placed by Floyd Mayweather as discussed in this thread are, as far as we can tell, actual money.)

Lots of story lines this week, so let's get right to it.

For starters, we have a new leader. While early front-runner Collin smugly took a bye week, AndrewPorter leaped into first place with a $248 win on Buffalo against the spread. Andrew seems to have found a winning strategy: bet the maximum amount possible against UConn.

But the real story is second place. LeavittTown, who was buried in last place and $318 behind the next-to-last player, had a huge week! He bet big ($100) on a three-team parlay and a money line, and hit both: East Carolina +398 over North Carolina, and a parlay of Texas A&M -3, Arizona State -5.5, and Central Florida +7 ATS. LT won a grand total of $998 fake dollars, vaulting him from dead last into contention, and ruining the image and the style we were used to.

Collin remains in the running, now in third place. Your standings:

Other matters of interest:

Last week's standings still had some math errors. I've redesigned the database and the standings algorithm in a way that I think will fix it once and for all. I totally mean it this time.

And, so you can check my math, I've added a historical bets feature to the View Picks page. If you are logged into protectyouru.net, you can see all your previous weeks' picks, and the results. If you spot any calculation errors, please let me know.

The Randolph and Mortimer Spite Bet of the Week is becoming difficult to award. Because I can't tell if people are betting against USF, UConn and Louisiana Tech out of spite, or because it's been a consistent winner. But there is a clear spite bet winner this week: iwaswrongabouthowell, who bet one fake dollar on Miami... on the money line. At -965 for a straight-up win, his one fake dollar won ten fake cents. He didn't just bet a fake dollar against USF; he did it in a way that wouldn't even win a fake dollar. That's cold, bro.

As for the Most Degenerate Bet of the Week... it's been bugging me that the Spite Bet award has a namesake (Randolph and Mortimer Duke from Trading Places) while the Most Degenerate Bet award doesn't. But I think we found a patron saint this week (hat tip @MikeManganello for bringing this to my attention):

I lost $40,000 on the second half... [pic] — https://t.co/JreUGPOjfL

— Floyd Mayweather (@FloydMayweather) September 29, 2013

That is apparently a betting slip in which the boxing champion placed $40,000 on Miami -7 over USF... for the second half of the game. Which he lost, because the second half score was 14-14, with Steven Bench's last-second touchdown pass costing Mayweather a push.

No worries: half an hour later, he won $87,000 on the Gators.

And at the risk of offending a guy who could cave in my skull with a flick of his finger: Pretty Boy Floyd needs to have his Money Team teach him what a vigorish is. Did you notice he paid -120 for that bet? Perhaps it's small change for a man who just got paid $41 million for a title fight, but 20 percent seems a steep price when you're dropping 40 large at a betting window. (In fact, his Florida bet was a more reasonable -115.)

So the guy dropped $40,000 on the second half of a blowout, didn't shop for a decent vig, lost on a meaningless pride touchdown, then bet twice as much half an hour later and won. All while having his very own Money Team, which you'd think would advise him on such things. In honor of this, the Most Degenerate Bet of the Week Award will now be called the Floyd's Money Team Most Degenerate Bet of the Week Award. It celebrates that part of our psyche that ought to be regulating our stranger betting decisions, but isn't.

There were quite a few contenders for the degenerate crown this week, but I'm going to give the award to zls44, just for the quantity of degenerate bets he made, and for hitting a respectable percentage of them:

• A parlay of Troy and Rice (lost);
• West Virginia +850 (won, and is the longest money line hit this season);
• Idaho +7.5 over Temple (won);
• Western Kentucky +140 over Navy (won);
• Wyoming -12.5 over Texas State (lost);
• Over 62.5 on Arkansas State-Missouri (lost);
• Over 58.5 in Fresno State-Hawaii (won);
• Army -127 money line over Louisiana Tech (won)

Congratulations zls44, you earned that award like USF earned its 2012 NCAA Tournament bid: by having one really good win, and winning 57% of the time against Sun Belt teams.

There's one more item of note from the past week, and we will once again have @FloydMayweather introduce it:

When the betting line changed from -3 to -14, I couldn't bet $300k. Too dangerous.

— Floyd Mayweather (@FloydMayweather) September 29, 2013

I'm not sure which game he was talking about, but a line move from -3 to -14 (and beyond) wasn't a problem for our players last week.

The Texas A&M at Arkansas game opened with the Aggies a mere 3-point favorite. diddybull32, RyanTSmith and jthoma11 all spotted this as a favorable line and jumped on it early. jthomas11 went for a split, also taking Arkansas +16, and won both sides of the wager. I will check with OddsShark to see if this -3 line was some kind of glitch. But I did confirm it was published at Oddsshark, and as such it is valid for our game.

As always, the first lines for the upcoming week are posted Monday night.