PYU Week 9: All Hallows’ Eve

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

It’s the Halloween weekend of games. Will USF decide to wear its “competitive football team” costume this weekend, or their “team that falls behind 24-0 before halftime” outfit?

Other news items:

• I didn’t bring back the halftime bet that was offered for the Tulane game. After a bye week, and with a new starting QB, USF’s performance level will be even more difficult to predict. The spread for the full game is 18, for what it’s worth.
• The Futures page is color-coded to show which futures bets stand to win, lose, or tie. Futures bets on win/loss total aren’t paid out until the team’s regular season ends, because the team also has to play their schedule as announced. But this page will tell you if you are in line for any windfalls. (When you lose a futures bet, you don’t lose any more units, because you paid when you placed the bet before the season.)
• The Standings page loads a lot faster now.

Here are everyone’s picks, as of about 11:30 Eastern:

This week’s results will be posted later on this thread.

RESULTS

First, a bit of Futures news: the futures bet on USF to win the AAC has officially lost. USF could mathematically get to 4-4, but even if we want to pretend there could be an armageddon scenario where no one get to 5-3, tiebreakers wouldn’t go USF’s way because they’ve already lost to four teams that would be in such a tie. So I’m comfortable marking his one zero. If you placed this bet, your “pending futures” amount is updated, but you don’t lose any money from your bankroll.

Our leaders mostly slipped back to the pack this week. First, let’s look at the overall standings:

McIntyre2K7, Danj725, and BullsOnParade96 all lost 243.82 or more in Week 9. jrjs made a gain this week, and is now in third place within striking distance within 200 of the leaders. dsidwell31 took only a small loss, keeping him in fourth. ElliotMoore, AndrewPina, defdans, anthonyvito and GaryStephen all had plus weeks and could into the race with a hot streak. AndrewPina and defdans also have some winning futures bets on the horizon.

Weekly standings and points earned:

The points race also sees jrjs closing in. He is now tied for second and could take the lead with a big Week 10.

I haven’t covered the individual winning bets, so we’ll do that now. Betting on underdogs was a theme this week. There were 20 games where one team was a double-digit underdog. 14 of 20, including USF, covered; two of them (Charlotte and North Texas, both of whom were on the road) won outright.

Tuesday night games start in Week 10, with MACtion! on Tuesday and Wednesday. Nationally, we’ve got a monster game in Tennessee-Georgia, but not too many other Top 25 matchups (Alabama-LSU, Wake Forest-NC State). A lot times that’s when chaos happens, though. Watch out for Clemson having to go to Notre Dame; the Irish have very quietly won 5 of 6, including UNC, BYU, and Syracuse.

In the AAC, we’ve got the 10th Place game between USF and Temple! Other games are Navy-Cincinnati, Tulane-Tulsa, Houston-SMU, UTEP-Rice, Western Kentucky-Charlotte, UTSA-UAB, and Memphis hosts that school we don’t talk about. FAU and East Carolina are off.