The Meatball Brothers could barely sleep the final weeks of Circa Survivor, the richest NFL handicapping contest ever with a guaranteed prize of $14.3 million.
“Honest to god, for the last two weeks, we’ve slept maybe two hours a night,” said Paul Czyz, 55, one of six members of the Meatball Brothers team in the $1,000-entry contest.
Neither could Harvard graduates Brian Wood and Zheng Fan, who teamed up on the Dream Stakes entry.
“It’s literally so much stress,” said Wood, 38. “I didn’t sleep well the past few weeks.”
Fan, 37, had a full head of hair before sweating out several close calls in the contest, in which entrants pick one straight-up NFL winner each week — including separate weeks for Thanksgiving and Christmas — but can use each team only once.
“The amount of hair we’ve lost in the last three weeks is insane,” Fan said.
The Meatball Brothers and Dream Stakes contestants can rest easy now. They survived Sunday on the Colts and Buccaneers, respectively, to become two of the eight 20-0 winners who split the $14,266,000 prize for $1,783,250 each.
“This was the best 20 weeks of my life, outside of my wedding and the birth of my children Owen and Noelle,” Carson Williams of the Meatball Brothers said after sweating out Indianapolis’ 26-23 win over the Jaguars in overtime.
The Meatball Brothers, made up of longtime friends who used to work together in meat sales, also won a six-figure hedge bet on Jacksonville, which closed as a 3½-point underdog.
Moments after Williams celebrated the victory by ripping off his green T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Meatball” and an image of a giant meatball, eight entries were eliminated when the Falcons (-8) fell 44-38 to the Panthers in overtime.
That upset increased the prize money for each winning entry by almost $800,000.
“They just poured freaking sprinkles on here with the Falcons losing,” said an ecstatic Williams, 37, from Minnesota. “Is this real? Are you sure?”
While Williams and most of the Meatball Brothers lived and died with every play in the Colts-Jaguars game, one team member, 66-year-old Angelo Grande, stayed in his hotel room at Circa, unable to watch.
“We sent one of our guys up to the room to sit in his closet, because he hasn’t watched a game all year,” Williams said. “We let him be here for the first quarter and we were like, ‘No.’ So we sent him there.”
Elite eight
Eighteen entries from a starting field of 14,266 survived until the final week of the NFL season.
Besides the eight that had their cruel fate sealed by Carolina, two were eliminated in excruciating fashion by the Packers.
Green Bay, a 10-point favorite over the Bears, took its first lead of the game, 22-21, on kicker Brandon McManus’ 55-yard field goal with 54 seconds left. But that turned out to be enough time for Chicago to set up kicker Cairo Santos’ game-winning 51-yard field goal as time expired.
Of the eight Survivor winners, one had the Cardinals, who pulled away in the second half en route to a 47-24 rout of the 49ers. Two had the Colts. Five had the Buccaneers, who trailed 16-6 at halftime before outscoring the Saints 21-3 in the second half on their way to a 27-19 triumph.
Wood said he made a hedge bet of almost $30,000 to win $200,000 on New Orleans on the money line in case Tampa Bay lost.
“But obviously at halftime, we were throwing up,” he said. “I don’t think you can have a worse half as a 14-point favorite against (quarterback) Spencer Rattler at home in a must-win game. It’s insane.”
Survivor sweats
While the contest winners survived some serious sweats in the final week, they also escaped several close calls during a season that saw the field slashed to 642 after Week 3.
The Meatball Brothers were among 4,895 entries that lost on the Bengals in Week 1. They also were among 2,304 entries that lost on the Ravens in Week 2 before riding their final entry to the promised land.
They were among several contest winners, including Dream Stakes, that sweated a 19-17 victory by the Chiefs over the Raiders on Black Friday. The Raiders were in position to kick a winning field goal in the final seconds when they fumbled a snap and Kansas City recovered.
“No one’s here without a lot of luck,” Wood said.
The Meatball Brothers also escaped with the Seahawks’ 6-3 win over the Bears on Dec. 26 before barely surviving the Rams’ 13-9 victory over the Cardinals on Dec. 28 with their next-to-last pick.
Arizona drove to the Los Angeles 5-yard line in the final minute before cornerback Ahkello Witherspoon picked off quarterback Kyler Murray in the end zone to preserve the Rams’ win.
“The last four weeks, every game we thought we were out,” Czyz said. “It’s been a whirlwind, man. It’s unbelievable.
“My whole family has been sweating it out. My wife said she just heard my daughter screaming and thought something was wrong. I’m like, ‘No, we just won the (expletive) tournament, baby.’”
Contact reporter Todd Dewey at [email protected]. Follow @tdewey33 on X.
