Protect Your Unit Week 3 Picks Thread

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

Once again, we have seen college football games moved or cancelled due to an impending hurricane. East Carolina-Virginia Tech, West Virginia-North Carolina State, Central Florida-North Carolina, Marshall-South Carolina, Southern Miss-Appalachian State, and Norfolk State-Liberty were all cancelled. Ohio-Virginia was moved to Vanderbilt Stadium in Nashville. Several other games in the region had their times and days moved up.

Campbell-Coastal Carolina was moved up to Wednesday, and played in Campbell’s stadium in tiny Buies Creek, North Carolina. This means an FBS team played a road game against an FCS team. As far as I know, this hasn’t happened since 1997, when Kent State visited Youngstown State. And it was a small FCS team to boot, from the limited-scholarship Big South Conference. Coastal won, 58-21. I really tried to you get a line for this game, but the line of Coastal -30 wasn’t published until after my PYU Wednesday morning update.

Some of you made bets on these games before they were cancelled. If you made a single bet, and want to get the money back to bet a different game, please send an email and I will take care of it. If you don’t want to re-bet, it will remain in the system as a VOID bet, and you will get your fake money back. Bets on cancelled games still count towards weekly requirements, so you don’t have to re-bet to fulfill them.

If you bet on one of these games as part of a parlay, the cancelled game will be removed from the parlay, and it will be evaluated as a 1- or 2-way parlay. This is per official rules 7.3.3 and 7.3.3.1. This situation came up in 2016, that was the ruling I made at the time, and I want to be consistent. I have since added this to the official rules.

So why do I allow single bets to re-bet, but not parlays? Here’s what I said at the time:

If [cancelled games in a parlay bet] were to occur, we would apply the rule whereby pushes are removed from the parlay, and the results are re-calculated as a 2-way parlay, or a single wager without vigorish.

I feel that the game being cancelled is part of the risk that is taken when a bet on a game is placed. You don’t get to revise your bet when other events occur, such as player injury, or adverse weather conditions. And I think being able to change one of the components of a parlay wager would go against the nature of a parlay.

This may prove to be advantageous or disadvantageous to [people who made a parlay wager that has a cancelled game in it]. But I don’t think it’s fair to let players change how that money is allocated. It opens a can of worms whereby some players will want to re-wager and others won’t; potentially ambiguous situations may arise; and I’ll have to manually keep track of it all. I am comfortable treating these games as cancelled or non-completed games are treated.

In other words, because a parlay is part of a larger bet, it doesn’t seem right to allow you to change it. Single bets have no further impact, so I don’t mind giving you the fake money back to re-bet if desired. I hope everyone understands this ruling.

Next news item: apparently the ol’ Gambletron 2000 had a quite a thing for the Memphis-Navy game. It offered it an ordinate number of times, including after the game had ended, and well into week 3. You know how old video games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Sinistar malfunctioned when some counter reached 255? Well, Memphis-Navy was game #127 in my database, and an error in the Gambletron 2000 treated any game number above 127 as 127. This has since been fixed.

So you can stop on betting on last week’s games now, you freaking degenerates. I won’t name names, but I will award everyone who exploited this bug the Floyd’s Money Team Degenerate Bet of the Week. And a nice big “VOID” in your list of results. Fake money doesn’t grow on trees, dammit.

Speaking of which, if you didn’t see my comments in last week’s Results thread: I heartily encourage bug exploitation. Two reasons: one, it tests the site for robustness, and brings errors to my attention so I can fix them.

More importantly: gamblers should be looking for every edge they can find. If a line looks off, go ahead and bet it. I can always cancel your bet if there’s a legit error. More often than not, errors reported to me have been by the real sports books we use, and stand up as valid PYU offerings. See last year’s Marshall-Pittsburgh game for further discussion of that.

Having said that, please do drop me a line if anything looks hinky. I work hard to keep the game fair and competitive for all.

Picks as of right now (7:35 AM Friday):

Parlay wagers include:

The View All Picks page should display everyone’s picks, and update throughout the weekend. Because of my day job, I have to pre-publish this post - I can’t do it at exactly noon Eastern. So this post is only as current as whenever I can work on it, usually Thursday night or Friday morning. The protectyouru.net website will have the most current list.

So, who ya got? Post your picks, commentary, spite/degenerate bets, and talk about this week’s games below.