The Top 100 and ties will collect season prize money. The list will be updated weekly in this column. Full standings can be found at the Standings link.

Still smokin'

Eleven weeks into the season and the pool leader is still on a  torrid pace.

Jason Hatala is still hanging onto the lead with a score of 45.0, or an average of 4.09 per week. No one in pool history has averaged 4.0 for a season. The all-time record for average weekly score belongs to Greg Leimkuehler who posted 3.81 in winning the pool in 2011.

Harms moved into the lead and has stayed there by averaging 4.5 over the last four weeks. He's up by 1.0 on Matt Mecca. Phil Choler, who held the lead for several weeks during the season it 3.0 back in third place.

With that in mind, let's look at where the pool is this year overall compared to the 2015 season.

At this time last year

Hatala's 11-week total of 45.0 matches the pool lead from a year ago. Last year, it was Ryan Harms at 45.0. Harms ended up in second place with 66.5 points, 0.5 behind winner Kylie Crosland. Crosland was in 28th place after Week 11 with 36.5 points before finishing strong to become the pool's first female champion.

Cumulative percentages are down across the board for the pool, with the biggest hit coming in Locks of the Week. The pool was at a .509 winning percentage last year and is a dismal .468 this year. When you consider that the Lock is supposed to be everyone's best pick, the low percentage is glaring. The pool has a .495 winnning percentage on more than 6,800 Locks since it was established in Year 4 of Pigskin Mania.

 Since overall percentages are down, the ratio of perfect weeks to the number of players is also down slightly. There have been 178 perfect weeks, only one less than last year, but there are 75 more players in the pool.

The chart below compares this season to last year in several statistical categories.

The view from China

The Poolmaster made it safely back to U.S. soil on Sunday afternoon after a week working with the Pac-12 Conference on their China game that featured Stanford vs. Harvard in Shanghai.

	The Poolmaster gets his ears
	One of the fun things The Poolmaster experienced in Shanghai was a trip to the brand new Shanghai Disney with the teams and the Pac-12 entourage. The park opened in June and is spectacular. The ears were a gift from the hosts.

Here are a few of the week's oddities - aside from hanging with Bill Walton - that come with running the pool from the other side of the planet:

• College GameDay began its broadcast at 10 p.m. Saturday night, China time. The Poolmaster was in his jammies and watched the program at bedtime. He was out like a light as his first pick of Penn St. kicked off at 1 a.m.

• It was early Sunday morning in China when picks were first posted, which was Saturday afternoon in the U.S.

• Internet access was iffy at about the time we were trying to post the spreads, which was late Thursday night in China. Those who follow on Facebook and Twitter were notified that the page was probably looking a little strange because we had to upload the pages through an FTP site and the graphics wouldn't load properly.

• The Poolmaster was in the air heading for home on a Sunday afternoon flight as his beloved Arizona Wildcats were taking another loss on Saturday night in Tucson.

• And the strangest thing of all is that The Poolmaster's flight left Shanghai at 1:45 p.m. on Sunday and arrived in San Francisco at 9 a.m. on Sunday. Where did the day go?

This and that

• In another example of the uncanny accuracy of the Vegas bookmakers, the Pigskin Special, Texas Tech vs. Oklahoma St., finished with 89 total points. The over/under on the game was 90. Texas Tech missed an extra point in the final minutes or the game would have gone to overtime tied with the O/U at 90.

• Eight of the top 10 NFL Bandwagon picks were losers sending the pool to its lowest number of total wins this season. There were 611 winners on 1,656 NFL picks, a .405 winning percentage.

• The Lock of the Week had its eighth overall losing week while the Special had it's ninth. The Locks are at a -243.5 cumulative total and the Special is at -167.0.

• We defaulted to the Sunday Night NFL game for the Special this week as there was a dearth of attractive games in both college and pro. Expect to see a steady diet of college games the next two or three weeks as the season winds down toward setting the College Football Playoff.

• This is the last week in which players have to pick at least two college and two NFL games. Starting Week 13, players can take any combination of five games from the Point Spreads page.