Smack Zone — College Football picks

By Erez Ladetzky, Smack Zone Contributor Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of months, you’ve seen all the commercials for FanDuel and Draft Kings. How could you not, they are only played about 23 hours and 59 minutes a day! Yesterday came word that an employee of Draft Kings won more than $300,000 on FanDuel. Nothing wrong with that. However, that employee used inside information not available to the public to pick his team. Everything wrong with that. Now, both sites have made it a rule that no employee is allowed to partake in the fun of daily fantasy sports. That makes perfect sense. It’s a bit surprising that this is the first we have heard of this going on. While gambling is “illegal” in almost every state, somehow the NFL partners with these sites that allow … wait for it … gambling. Daily fantasy during the NFL season is fun. I play using FanDuel and it allows for much more creativity than your regular fantasy team. Every week, you pick a lineup using a $60,000 salary cap. You guess who will have the best games that week. The key is finding cheap players who will have career games that week. There are tons of $1, $2 and $5 leagues with 100 other people that can win you a few hundred dollars. There are also bigger promotion leagues in the same price range with over 200,000 entries that you can win over $100,000 thousand. This is why these sites are so popular right now: Any given week you can win a lot of money. But don’t bet on winning in the large promotional leagues; that is (or was) a privilege reserved for the employees of FanDuel and Draft Kings. All that said, one great way to win some sweet Smack Apparel merchandise is to enter and win the weekly football picks contest. It is LIVE NOW, and the weekly winner gets three (3) Smack Apparel shirts, while the runner-up gets one. Go register at CONTEST.SMACKAPPAREL.COM and make your picks. DO IT. We promise no Smack Apparel employee will snake the victory away from you.

Week five of the college football season is shaping up to be the best so far. There are so many marquee matchups. More on that below, because one game stands head and shoulders above ANYTHING the rest of the country can conjure. Eastern Michigan at Louisiana State University. Wait. What? Let us explain: Earlier this week, Herschel Walker said that he thinks Leonard Fournette is a better running back in college than he was. Walker is regarded as one of the top college players of all time, and a winner of the Heisman trophy. For him to say Fournette is better makes us think HARD about it. And you know what? Walker might have a point.

They can't tackle him pic.twitter.com/spxFwlkcNl

— The LSU Logo (@LSU_Logo) September 19, 2015

  Fournette is averaging over 200 yards a game so far. He is so good, he has many people saying he should sit out next year to not hurt his draft stock *cough cough Marcus Lattimore*. There are a few worthy candidates for the Heisman this season, including RB Nick Chubb of Georgia, QB Jared Goff of Cal, and any given Ohio State Buckeye skill player. Fournette needs to keep his torrid pace to be the first non QB to win the award since Mark Ingram in 2009. We aren’t talking another 200-yard, 2 TD game here. No. We want to see Fournette go off for 400 yards and 6 TD. Just absolutely demolish that Eastern Michigan defense. Against weaker competition, he needs to be the dean of Ball-So-Hard University. Come Saturday night, we fully expect Fournette to run wild and take even more of strangle hold on the Heisman. Apparently, EMU's defense sucks. Like, really sucks. So, his biggest competition Saturday night could very well be his playing time and touches. Just give him the damn ball, LSU. Just let him do him. Oh, as we mentioned, there are a FEW other things to watch besides Fournette’s assault on the college football history book. Here’s a quick look at the games we’ll be watching: No. 23 West Virginia at No. 15 Oklahoma: They battle to see who will finish behind TCU and Baylor. No. 1 Ohio State at Indiana: This will be Cardele Jones’s first true road game, and if this was Indiana basketball, he might have to worry. IU football? Not so much. Probably. No. 3 Ole Miss at No. 25 Florida: The Rebs bring their championship hopes to Gainesville, where the Gators might have to rely on another fourth-quarter meltdown in order to win. No. 13 Alabama at No. 8 Georgia: This will be the first time Bama is an underdog (+1.5) in five years. Let the panic ensue! No. 6 Notre Dame at No. 12 Clemson: Hopefully no ND more players get injured before the game or they might have to forfeit. Feeling lucky? Want to prove your prognostication prowess? Play the Smack Apparel weekly picks contest. You could win Smack Apparel t-shirts and bragging rights.