Way back in the day I would compete against a group of friends in a yearly yahoo college football confidence points against the spread football pool.  In the nearly 10 years it ran I was only able to win it once.  It disbanded about 8 or 9 years ago but this year I decided to play again.  I don't really follow college football all that closely anymore and most of my picks are guesses or picks I've heard from handicappers who do follow college football but I decided to post my weekly results.

Basically the line opens on Monday and it's tracked daily until it locks in on Thursday.  At this point you pick a side Against The Spread and assign your level of confidence on the play.  The higher the points you set the more sure you are you have the winning side.  Week 1 was fairly easy as a few of the lines were set to "off" which means there is no spread on the game and you just take the seeded team who is playing a vastly inferior opponent.  Only one time in my memory has an "off" game went to the underdog and that was when Michigan was upset by Appalachian State back in 2007, in fact @Mikey just wrote a piece about that game here as they very nearly upset another top ranked team the first week of this season.  Ironically I had Penn State covering in that game and put 11 confidence points on it.

There is still a game to be played tonight but I only put 1 confidence point on that one.  So far this week I've accumulated 147 out of the possible 210 points.  If I were to win the game played today that would put my total at 148.  This doesn't seem very good until you factor in that these games are especially difficult to predict.  I remember some weeks there would be over 20 games with well over 200 points you could earn I would score under 100.

One trend I've noticed in college football is that usually the favorites cover in week 1.  As the season goes on though you really have to look for spots and know your teams as the lines can get way off kilter.  Some teams will be looking ahead to big games while other teams will consider their top 25 opponent their big game of the season and all the sudden a top ranked team is fighting to get by an inferior opponent when they are favored by 3 TDs or more.

There were only 2 big upsets this week in the top 25.  #25 LSU upset #9 Miami and unranked Maryland upset the 23rd ranked Texas Longhorns.  I picked the favorite to cover in those games and got them both wrong as the favorite lost outright.

If you'd like to hop in and play, the group I set up is on yahoo labeled "scorum" the password I set up is "murocs" which is "scorum" spelled backwards.  You won't be able to accumulate points for this week but we can compete week to week from here on out if you're ever so inclined.