Protect Your Unit 1 Week Results: Tampa Bay Lightning

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

At the end of every college football week, we post the updated Protect Your Unit leaderboard, and talk about last week's games. This thread usually launches Monday morning, but because we had a Monday night game, it is Tuesday just this time.

First, let's talk about the cancelled Idaho-Florida game. All bets on the Idaho-Florida game were voided. No money was won or lost. If the game is rescheduled for a later date, any bets made up until now will NOT apply to it - you must place the bet again. The Idaho-Florida game still counts as making a bet towards meeting the three bets/5% of your bankroll per week minimums.

Second, I have decided that because I was a little late in launching the game this year, that you do not have to take Week 1 as a bye week. If you didn't place any wagers for Week 1, you may join the game now, and still have two bye weeks going forward.

The standings so far:

You may be wondering how leavitttown could win $266.98 when you can only bet a maximum of $250 in week one. That is the power of money lines: he put $100 on California to defeat Northwestern at +340, for a $340 win. Underdog money lines, and also parlays, can pay off big. leavittown also had Temple at +425; it's a shame he only put one dollar on it.

The first week's other big winner was Collin, who put $249 of his weekly $250 stake on Penn State and Louisville against the spread.

Bets that didn't pan out: chuckycrater put $150 on Florida State to cover -17.5 vs. Florida State; ucscott had $100 on UCLA -21 at Virginia; iwaswrongabouthowell missed on three different $50 bets (LSU, Boise State, Vanderbilt all to cover).

We always award a spite bet of the week and degenerate bet of the week, which are:

Randolph and Mortimer Spite Bet of the Week: I'm going to call co-winners on this one: chuckycrater, for continuing to bet $1 against Louisiana Tech every week going into a second year now; and zls44, for the $6.66 "Satan Bet" on the Boston College-Massachusetts game. As a UConn supporter, I suspect he has a strong disdain for those two schools. I wish I'd thought of that for Penn State-UCF.

Floyd's Money Team Degenerate Bet of the Week: kendom and ULismyhothotsex both bet on FIU to beat lower-division Bethune-Cookman against the spread. They won, but only because FIU came up with a late touchdown to cover. That's right: FIU was a three-point underdog to an FCS team. Man, USF needs to get FIU back on the schedule.

The first set of lines for next week's games is posted. As always, the lines will be updated once a days, generally in the evening. Our Maryland sister site Testudo Times has an interesting article about the Maryland-USF line. It talks about why point spreads move... and why they don't sometimes.

If you'd like to join the fake gambling fun, email me at angerthespy@gmail.com and I will set you up with a username and password. All readers and fans of all schools are welcome. Happy fake gambling!