Weekend Wesults (a day late - switched with UAD this week!)

Thanks for your patience with us flip-flopping these articles this week - with all the coaching changes (and more coming! Amazing!), we wanted to get our two cents - or rather, our two senses - in as quickly as we could! Besides, both the NFL and CFL had thrilling Monday night games to wait for the conclusion of... Anyway - on to our results!

So, our Canadian Football League predictions: Toronto over Ottawa (28-23) from last Tuesday; Hamilton over Saskatchewan (34-20)…Calgary holds off Edmonton (holding our breath on this one – 30-27)…BC to defeat Winnipeg (in Vancouver, not a stretch: 20-14)…and Montreal catches Toronto on six days rest (28-27, despite the Argos being favored otherwise). OOPS!

Results? 2-3 straight up (got the first two right), 4-1 against the spread (missed the last one). OVERALL, 37-28 straight up, 37-26-3 ATS.

Next, our National Football League predictions: Houston (+0.5) upsets Indianapolis Thursday night…on Sunday, Atlanta (-8) covers against Washington…Cincinnati (-3) covers against Seattle…Green Bay (-9.5) covers against the Rams…Philadelphia (-4.5) covers against New Orleans…and Buffalo (-2.5) covers at Tennessee. On the flip side of that coin, Cleveland (+6.5) beats the spread against the Ravens…Chicago (+9.5) stays close to the Chiefs…and Jacksonville (+2.5) at least covers against Tampa. In the late games Sunday, Arizona (-3), New England (-9.5), Denver (-5.5), and the Giants (-7) all win by more than those spreads against Detroit, Dallas, Oakland, and San Francisco, respectively. Finally, on Monday night, Pittsburgh (+3) upsets San Diego.

Results? Nailed 8 out of 14 completely (Green Bay, Philly, Cleveland, Chicago, Arizona, New England, Denver, and Pittsburgh, thanks to the wildcat Deveon Bell!); also picked winners Atlanta, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and the Giants; only missed two games completely – Houston lost to Indy, and Tampa covered against Jacksonville. So, 8-6 against the spread, 12-2 winners. OVERALL, we’re 52-24; against the spread we’re 49-27.

With our college picks, there are so MANY that it’s too time consuming to list all the wins and losses we went through, but let’s give you the overall breakdown…

There was a large group of games where we felt that the favorite would not only win but cover the Vegas spread… Of those 38 games, we went 19-19 regarding that particular call against the spread, and seven of those 38 actually lost their games (so we were 31-7 with those straight up).

Then, we had a list of 17 games where we thought the underdog would at least beat the spread and (in some cases) win outright:

Within that group, we correctly called four upsets (out of five predictions – VERY nice!) – Wisconsin over Nebraska, U Conn over UCF, Rice over Florida Atlantic, and San Diego St over Hawaii. Overall in this group, we nailed 16 out of 17 winners (16-1!) and went 9-8 against the spread.

Finally, we predicted margins of victory for all 54 FCS games last weekend, and nailed a couple right on the number: Bethune-Cookman Thursday night over SC State, 17-14, and Western Carolina over Mercer by three as well.  Overall, we got 38 winners (don’t know how pleased we are with a 38-16 record on this…), and there were 20 of those games in which we got within ten points of the actual score, which actually is pretty good! Some of the games, though, really caught us by surprise – Rhode Island shutting someone out? (20-0 over Delaware!) UC Davis winning and Montana losing? Maine and Richmond beating Albany and Elon surprised us, Central Connecticut beating ANYONE surprised us (35-33 over Bryant), and the Big South (where we PROMISED no upsets!) saw lowly Gardner-Webb upset a Liberty team we had picked by 19!

So, on the whole, our college football predictions looked like this for Week 5: Straight up, we went 85-24 all across the board this weekend (47-8 in the FBS alone), and against the Vegas spread, which is just for FBS games, we went a pedestrian 28-27. For the season, we are 448-117 overall and 240-215 ATS, with 2 pushes. That’s down to 79% straight up and still at 53% against the spread. Not as impressive as the rest of our body of work this year!

As for our competition success, in our NFL “Pigskin Pick’em”, we are in the top 10% out of 500,000 entries in the straight up competition, and in the top 1% (in fact, the top thousand entries) in the competition against the spread!

For the college pick’em game, as you might expect from our struggles above, we’re not nearly as high, although we ARE in the top third of the 250,000 entries at 68+%! So, room to improve!

(And don’t forget that we ended the AFL season in the top 1% for finals and 5% for the season!)

Finally, for the Canadian Football League “Pick’em” prediction contest, we’re still in the top fifth, continuing to sit right around #2000-#2500 out of 14,000 (somewhere between 80-85%, depending on how we do that week)!

So, we may not be perfect, but we’re WAY better than average on all fronts!

Early Game Update!

From the first set of games on this Week 12 Saturday...

- Big Ten games: except for the Gopher - Husker tussle (which ended in a Minnesota 28-24 win), it was mostly routs - Michigan St over Rutgers, 45-3; Northwestern beat Purdue 38-14, and Ohio St survived Indiana 42-27 (although the Hoosiers led 21-20 in the third). Illinois did put some fun into the afternoon, though, kicking a field goal late to win 16-14 against Penn St.

- Semi bye week in the south started with Florida over Eastern Kentucky 52-3, Georgia handled Charleston Southern 55-9, South Carolina took down South Alabama of the Sun Belt, 37-12, and Army upset FCS Fordham (in our opinion!) 42-31.

- And in other interesting games in the Bowl division, Western Kentucky took down UT-San Antonio 45-7; SMU lost their tenth of the year, 53-7, to UCF; Marshall survived UAB 23-18, thanks to a punt downed at the 1 followed by a fumble recovery in the end zone; Houston 38, Tulsa 28; and the defensive struggle that went into overtime scoreless, eventually ending in a hockey shootout - kinda, sorta. Anyway, Wake Forest's kicker made both of his attempts, and Virginia Tech's went 1-2; therefore, Demon Deacons 6, Hokies 3, in the battle of cool mascots in Winston-Salem, NC!

- The Game ended with an 80-yard drive that gave the Crimson of Harvard their 18th Ivy League title and a 31–24 comeback win over arch-nemesis Yale...Rhode Island won their first game in over a year, overcoming Towson 13-7!...And Coastal Carolina LOST their first of the year, falling to Liberty 15-14 on a late field goal to drop to 11-1.

As for the FCS games of interest yesterday,

...let's start with our usual topic of intrigue, really bad teams. Of course, if you're in the Ivy League, you're allowed to be good, bad, or indifferent about football - you're too busy getting ready to run our country in the coming years. 

But in Cornell @ Columbia, two winless teams squared off. Sagarin had this projected as a 3-point Cornell win, and the Big Red did win, 30-27. But the how and why are hysterical: each team scored four touchdowns, but Cornell blocked the extra point on Columbia's last TD and ran it back for their own two point conversion, making it 27-23 at the time and setting the stage for their own game-winning drive in the fourth quarter. 

As for the three other bottom-feeders we follow (three?), Rhode Island actually put up a fight at Stony Brook, losing 14-35. But good ol' Savannah St managed zero points, negative 8 yards rushing, and just 165 yards of total offense in the entire game in losing to North Carolina A&T 34-0. In the true tradition of a body-bag school, Savannah goes to BYU next week, where the early Sagarin ratings list them as potentially a 54-point underdog. And history says they'll lie down and take their beating appropriately.

Who's the third bottom-feeder? In two of those ratings that we linked you to earlier this week, we noticed that there's a team below both URI and Savannah St: Davidson, Stephen Curry's alma mater, apparently doesn't play football as well as they do hoops. They have a record of 1-10 this year, having lost nine straight against FCS opponents and one more to Catawba, who we think is D2. Their one victory was to "College of Faith-Charleston", for whom we cannot even find a listing at any level of NCAA or NAIA, 56-0.

Anyway, playing Marist yesterday, Davidson was down 38-0 with a minute to go in the third, having produced a total of two first downs and 58 yards of offense. As Marist started their mass substitutions, Davidson finally produced a twelve-play, TWO yard drive (that required getting to a 3rd down on the Marist 16 and then ending fourth down at midfield!), which was finally followed by a 13-play drive in the fourth against the last-stringers that scored a late TD to make the score 38-7. It'd be fun to watch them play Savannah St...

In higher-quality news, North Dakota St started a new winning streak, beating Missouri St 45-10, while their vanquisher Northern Iowa also won, beating Southern Illinois 40-21. And out in the Big Sky conference, we were happy to see alma mater Sacramento St win 48-41 at home against Portland St! Montana St held off Idaho St at home 44-39, and Montana beat Southern Utah 35-17.

So much for that 33-game winning streak!

The defending FCS champion North Dakota St Bison didn't just lose yesterday, they were  almost shut out by division rival Northern Iowa, 23-3.

The Bison's 33 game winning streak, encompassing three national championships, was the longest in FCS history. But against the 19th ranked Panthers, they were outgained 306-175, doubled up in first downs, 16-8, went one for fourteen in 3rd down conversions, rushed 28 times and gained only 43 yards, and (with the exception of a turnover on the UNI 12, when they scored their FG) had the following starting field positions, ALL in their own territory: the 25, the 3, the 10, 37, 34, 20, 25, 42, 18, the 8, and the 20. 

On the far end of the spectrum, the two 0-9 teams we follow went to 0-10 yesterday: Rhode Island fell to 8-1 New Hampshire 41-14, while Savannah St lost 51-21 to visiting Howard University. Those streaks now extend to 14 and 19, respectively.

In the Big Sky conference, Eastern Washington beat traditional champ Montana 36-28 on the red field in Cheney to remain in control of the conference title, although four teams share the lead in the loss column: EWU, Northern Arizona, Montana St, and surprising Idaho St, winners against Cal Poly SLO yesterday at home to get to 7-3. In 2013, they went 3-9, the three wins coming against Northern Colorado and two D2 teams; they finished the season on a six-game losing streak and having failed nine of their last ten excursions. Now, they're two games from a playoff berth!

Week 9 upset alerts...and "as expected" alerts!,

Start in Division 1A - excuse us: "FCS"! - where defending champion North Dakota St trails 10-6 at the half to South Dakota St, which would be a huge upset, especially on the Bison's home field! What are NOT upsets are losses by Rhode Island (#13 in a row, falling to 0-9 this season by losing 28-13 at Delaware) and our personal favorite, Savannah St, who fell 59-7 at South Carolina St to extend its losing streak to eighteen, nine last year and nine this.

As for the FBS ranks, as usual, some of the "upsets" we called in advance, and some we missed entirely: 

Duke took two OTs to beat Pitt, who helped them out by missing a 26 yarder on the last play of regulation. We favored them, though Vegas had it the other way. Two OTs means we were half right.

East Carolina lost both their game and their favored underdog status today...TCU trails West Virginia by thirteen late in the third...and at the World's Largest Cocktail Party, the best drinks are being served on the Florida side of the parking lot, leading Georgia 24-7 in the third.