Protect Your Unit 2022 Is Open!

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

Yes, it’s time to announce our silly little game again. Protect Your Unit, presented by The Daily Stampede, is back for Season 10 in its current format. I want to give it some pretentious sequel name, like Protect Your Unit X: The Legend Of Curly’s Gold.

I’ve enjoyed running this regular feature for all these years, and I’m ready to do it for you all again. Protect Your Unit - PYU for short - is a simulation of real-life sports gambling, on college football. Everyone starts the season with $1,000 fake dollars, and can place fake bets for up to $250 (or 25% of your bankroll) on each week’s FCS games. Realistic odds are offered, and realistic vigorish (the house fee for winning a bet) must be paid. At the end of the football season, whoever has the most fake money is declared the winner. Point spread, money line, over/under, and parlays are all offered.

The traditional prize is the Protect Your Unit Silver Gin Bowl, a name I introduced at the end of the 2019 season. In 2019 Undercoverbull lost $400 fake dollars in five weeks, and assumed his Week 6 bets would fail because of a new brand of silver gin he’d been sampling. He won a massive parlay instead (which included USF covering a road game), went on a tear the rest of the season, and won the season by a large margin. This will be delivered to you in gift card form. Alternative prizes are available for those under 21 or who simply prefer a non-alcoholic trophy. And, in the spirit of degenerate gambling, I still need to settle up with last year’s winners.

Official rules are at the protectyouru.net website. The points race from 2021 will be back. In additional to the traditional “most money at the end of the season wins” contest, there is a parallel contest where points are awarded for winning the most fake money in each week. The top player each week will get 20 points, then 15 for second place, and then 10-7-5-4-3-2-1. Players must profit during a week to make a profit, and anyone who profits during a week will get at least 1 point for that week. Last year ULhothot won the money race and BullsOnParade96 won the points race.

Rules changes this year will be:

• The Gambletron 3000, a page that offered a single line at -102 instead of the usual -110, will be expanded! Now there will be up to 3 games available at any given time at -102, and you can bet place any bet on them (over, under, either team’s point spread).
• Incoming AAC teams UAB, FAU, UTSA, Rice, North Texas, and Charlotte will count as AAC teams for purposes of meeting the “one AAC bet” requirement. Games involving exiting teams Houston, UCF and Cincinnati will only count if their opponent is a remaining or future AAC teams.

The Week 1 betting window is now open! You can enter your choices for Week 1’s games at the Make Picks page. Please note that Week 1 includes the eleven games this weekend , as well as all of next weekend’s games, and the weeknight games in between. This page is working correctly, as far as I know. So log in and start fake betting already.

If you need to reset your password from last year, get in touch with me. If you don’t have a login for the website, want to join the competition, or you forgot your password from last year, send an email to me at this address and I can set you up. We like people to use their SB Nation names so we know who’s who, but please do NOT use the same password as SB Nation website. Any questions, please contact me the same way, or post them in the thread. Fans of all schools and websites are welcome to join.