Well, it turns out I’m not a bad House. The total points standing after Week 1: -26.
*Edit: Nooo! A transcription error in favor of the House has been corrected. This week’s overall score now stands at 74 in favor of the players. Darn!
I’ll break down all the fun stats in a second, but without further ado, here are your standings from a weekend full of guesses:
The biggest disappointment here was Donovan Peoples-Jones, who amounted to -1300 points total after I tantalized you all with the prediction of an 11-yard performance in his opening game. Turns out he got zero, although he did look pretty sweet on punt returns.
DPJ attracted the most bets, but he was followed closely by Michigan running back Chris Evans. A lot of players were attracted to the ‘over’ on Chris Evans’ receiving prediction (9 yards), which was another boon for the house. However, some fans wanted to bet on the prediction that he’d get 112 rushing yards - three took the over, and three took the under, and he ended up with 78.
The saving grace for everyone came from Khalid Hill getting more than my predicted 3 rushing yards against the Gators - specifically, 5, which gave everybody a 50-point max return. He gave the players 750 points.
Two very clever predictions: one person bet on Eddie McDoom getting more than 0 rushing yards, which I hadn’t even thought of, and there was also the rare bet on John O’Korn getting more than 0 passing yards that proved fruitful. After the game I realized another smart bet would have been ‘under’ on Wilton Speight rushing yards, since the quarterback usually accumulates sack yardage. Alas, no one did it.
I’ll get to work on gathering my predictions for Michigan-Cincinnati, and next week we’ll rank players by their Week 2 performance but also keep track of their yearly total.
This has been a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to doing this every week - thanks for the fun exercise and all the great emails I got from you guys. Good luck against me this week.