It wasn’t a great start for the Lockness Monsters in week 1 of college football. BYU took home a cover, and Auburn and Kentucky covered for parts of the games before relinquishing its hold toward the end. Arizona State hung for awhile and Georgia Southern was way off.
The biggest improvement usually happens from week 1 to 2, but there’s still a few things we learned from week.
Here’s three things we learned from college football’s opening weekend.
Pac-12 still has work to do
When it comes to covering the spread, the Pac-12 didn’t do much for bettors this weekend.
In games that featured a spread this weekend, the Pac-12 was almost shut out. Only Washington, USC and Utah covered the spread eight games. That number included Stanford, which showed it still has a long way to go this season to be competitive in a 16-6 loss to Northwestern, and Arizona State, which the final score didn’t do it justice as Texas A&M scored plenty of garbage time scores.
Those were national games that were supposed to showcase the Pac-12 as the best conference in the nation. Instead, the SEC continues its dominance, and the Pac-12 is still on the outside looking in.
Utah showed why it should compete in the Pac-12, but losses by Colorado as a 7-point favorite, and Washington State, which didn’t have a spread during a FCS loss to Portland State, aren’t giving bettors any optimism for the future. The loss for the Cougars also puts their over/under of five wins for the season in serious jeopardy.
A cover rate of three out of eight games isn’t a good sign for Pac-12 fans. There’s still plenty of season left, but oddsmakers will likely reconsider future spreads based on the outcome of this week’s games.
Under 1.5 likely a good pick for Kansas
Kansas’ over/under of 1.5 drew plenty of snickers this year. Betting a team to win less than two games is almost unheard of, but we took the bait and went with less than two wins.
With the Jayhawks loss against South Dakota State on Saturday, the likelihood of Kansas winning one game or less took a giant leap forward.
There won’t be another game in which the Jayhawks will be favored, and next week’s opponent Memphis cruised to a win Saturday. Week 1 was almost a must win to achieve the over for Kansas and for part of the game, it was a blowout in favor of the FCS team. That’s a bad sign for the Jayhawks with 11 games remaining.
Big spreads don’t matter to SEC
SEC teams dominated its way through this weekend.
SEC teams were 8-3 against the spread. What’s most amazing about that impressive number is that most of the teams weren’t doing it with single-digit spreads.
Three teams entered week 1 with single digit spreads – Texas A&M, Vanderbilt and South Carolina. All three covered (Vanderbilt lost, but covered the 2.5 points). The other five wins, were double digits. Had Auburn not collapsed, and Kentucky kept firing away, this number could have been even better, which is scary.
The competition wasn’t fierce, but look at the covers from Saturday – Georgia at -36 (it won by 37), Arkansas at -33 (it won by 35), Tennessee at -21 (it won by 29), Florida at -37 (it won by 48) and Alabama at -11 (it won by 18). No matter how you look at those numbers, that’s impressive.
It will be interesting to see how oddsmakers treat the conference in the coming weeks. Usually bettors lay the points with spreads that big. However, at least in week 1, SEC teams gave plenty of points and still came out on top.
