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.

Full speed ahead

There was a crowd at the top of the standings just two weeks ago with a three-way tie for first place and a bunched up Top 10.

But since then, Jason Hatala has put some distance between himself and the field.

With back-to-back scores of 5.0, Hatala has opened a 5-point lead at 56.0 with five weeks to go. Matt Mecca is the closest pursuer at 51.0.

From 2008 when he joined the pool to 2014, Hatala had seen a steady decline in his final standings. His rookie year saw him finish in 67th place. He finished lower in the standings each year until he hit bottom and finished in 365th place in 2014. He moved up to 181 last season, but there was no indication that he might be in contention this season.

Hatala is one of 32 players with at least two perfect weeks this season, but his steadiness is what has kept him near the top. He has three weeks with scores of 1.0, but otherwise has not scored less than 4.0 in the other 11 weeks. He also is +9.0 combined in the Special and the Lock of the Week, two categories that, on average, have been a negative for the pool.

For an encore

This week's Pigskin Special is an encore of the NFL's opening Special of the season - Cowboys at Giants.

The Giants were the last and only team to hand the suprising Cowboys a loss this season, taking the first meeting in Dallas.

"We don't usually do this," said The Poolmaster. "We didn't look through the archives, but we believe this is the first time both meetings between a pair of NFL teams have been in the Special. We'll be interested to see what the pool does with this one."

Batting -1,000

The pool suffered it's 10th straight losing week in the pool when Penn St. came back from 21 points down to Wisconsin to cover and win the Big Ten Championship. In doing so, the Special reached a dubious milestone.

With 12 losing records in 14 weeks in the Special, the pool has a cumulative season point total of -244.5. That dropped the pool's all-time cumulative total to -1,059.5. It's a .473 winning percentage all-time, .470 this season.

"This is supposed to be a hard game, but this year has been a little ridiculous," The Poolmaster said. "We said when the season started that we were going to focus on games that looked like they might get equal action on both sides, and we've been pretty successful at that. But we had no idea it was going to be this tough for so many."

This and that

• Chris Welsh was happy to announce on the PM Facebook page that he ended the eighth longest active streak without a perfect week when he hit one. It was the first for Welsh who joined the pool in 2010 and built a streak of 125 weeks.

• Meanwhile, Mike Feder is at 195 weeks.

• The result of the Pigskin Special sent the pool to its second worst week of the season in college games with a .390 winning pct. The pool rebounded a bit by going .578 in NFL games, but it was another less than .500 week for the pool.

• Week 15 is technically the last week of the college regular season with Army-Navy as the only college game. Bowl games start to come into play in Week 16.

• The bowl schedule is complete so the Dirty Dozen Bowl Pool is right around the corner. We plan to update the page for this year's contest about Dec. 16 which will give everyone 10 days to make picks. The first games in the pool will be Dec. 26. We also plan to update the Accounts page with the season's winnings so far so players know if they have money in their accounts to spend on the bowl pool. The entry fee is $10.