Bettin’ or Braggin’: Slap-grab handshakes

In our first week picking pro football against the spread here at SFBay, at least one of us is real happy we’re not playing with real money.

Ali Thanawalla strapped on a 1-5 first week to toss 500 SFBay Bucks into the wind. Mark Sanchez’ New York teammates shocked most of the world — and all of us — with an offensive onslaught against a confused Buffalo squad.

We all grabbed a little bonus Monday night when Oakland totally underestimated the importance of the long snap. Who knew Jon Condo was the most valuable player on the team? One sure bet: Many teams took extra work there this week.

One takeaway from Week 1: Parity, schmarity. There are some bad football teams in this league. Squads like Buffalo, Arizona and Cleveland destined for their typical fates. Thank God Jim Harbaugh for San Francisco lifting themselves out of that muck.

Speaking of the too-hard hand-shaking sideline prowler, maybe we should wager the over-under on the number of words Harbaugh and Jim Schwartz will mutter at each other during their post-game handshake this week?

Get your picks into the comments or just watch along for fun and yucks. If you want to jump in, there are plenty of SFBay bucks for everybody. How we roll.

I’ll be over here counting my SFBay Bucks.

Fair warning: We’re not touts, sharks or bookies. We don’t splash action around the web or line up bets in back alleys. We’re just a few local writers picking games without much of a clue. So using these picks for your own gambling is probably a very bad idea.

Leaderboard

Name	Bankroll	Last week
Jesse	10,200	+200
Chelena	10,000	+0
Ali	9,500	-500

Week Two

Game	Ali	Chelena	Jesse
Detroit at San Francisco (-6 1/2)	SF 200	SF 100	SF 400
Oakland at Miami (-2 1/2)	OAK 100	OAK 100	MIA 300
Denver at Atlanta (-3)	DEN 100	ATL 100	ATL 200
New York (A) at Pittsburgh (-6)	NY 100	PIT 100	PIT 200
Chicago at Green Bay (-6)	CHI 100	GB 100	GB 200
Washington (-3)at St. Louis	WAS 200	WAS 100	WAS 400

To refresh anyone’s memory on how point spreads function, the team with the “minus points” is the favored team, and has the “point spread” deducted from their score at the end of the game. The final score adjusted by the point spread determines the winner of the bet.

If a team is favored by three points, they must win by more than three points to win a point spread bet.

You Can Win!

Of course you can play along with Bettin’ or Braggin! What kind of pro football picking game would Bettin’ or Braggin’ be if you couldn’t play?

You can win prizes! (We can’t. All SFBay staff can win are bragging rights over each other. In other words, priceless.)

But first, some rules:

• You’ll need to to pick at least six of the 17 weeks of the pro football season to be eligible to win a prize.
• We will pick all San Francisco and Oakland games in the regular season. All other games selected are at the sole discretion of SFBay.
• You play the game by posting your picks to the pre-selected pro football games in the comment thread of the SFBay Bettin’ or Braggin’ post each week. Your pick should consist of a city and a dollar amount for all six games. All your picks must be posted in a single comment.
• The deadline for entering Bettin’ or Braggin’ is Sunday, September 30 at 11:59 p.m. The deadline for submitting your picks is 10 a.m. Sunday (Pacific Time) each week. We won’t be picking Thursday games because Thursday pro football is bullshit.*
• The winner is the player who ends up with the most SFBay Bucks at the end of the pro football regular season. Sorry, SFBay Bucks have absolutely no cash value or equivalent.

* – Actually, we will be picking two Thursday games, the Seattle-San Francisco game Oct. 26 and the Denver-Oakland game Dec. 6. On those weeks, the deadline for weekly picks will be Thursday at 5 p.m. See why we don’t like Thursday games? Too complicated.

Fabulous Prizes

Third-place: SFBay black fleece hoodie, high quality. Nice stuff. $50 value.

Second-place: Limited-edition, authentic SFBay Golden Gate FC soccer shirt, customized with your name. $120 value.

First place: A green Joe Montana Notre Dame Adidas jersey, “True School Authentics,” Size 56. Very high quality retro-authentic heavy mesh. Brand-new, never-worn condition. All tags attached. Very collectible. $250 value.