Finally, some progress.
For the week I went 13-2 straight up and a respectable 11-4 ATS. That makes me 35-12 straight up for the season and 22-25 ATS. I feel pretty good about this because a couple of the games in the loss column ATS are games that would have been lay-offs.
For one, Michigan. Since I'm a fan of Big Blue I rarely bet them. It's too hard to keep the heart out of the way. For the aTm/Alabama game, I picked Bama by 14 but the line move said aTm (it finished around - 9 1/2 to 10 right before kick-off.) When a line says go a different way from what your gut instinct says, lay off. When aTm back-door covered on the long TD pass I felt pretty good. I'd have felt even better were I in Vegas actually betting on the game.
As my Vegas trip gets closer, I'll start pruning my games list. Typically in Vegas I only bet 6-7 games including one pretty good sized parlay. For week 4 I'm going to reduce the list to 10 games in advance of that. I like trying to pick a broad spectrum of games however so I'll include some predictions that are clearly not games I would bet to try and keep the number at 15.
As usual, here's my top 10 takeaways from Week 3 of College football.....
1. - About those defenses: In short, there's very litte in college football right now. Vegas hasn't adjusted to this fully yet so "Over" is a pretty strong play for several teams right now.
2. - The eyes of Texas are crying. And boy is that defense in need of some work. 6-6 feels like the ceiling for this Longhorn team, not the floor.
3. - You have to think the Rice Owls are a favorite to win C-USA this year. UH is in some trouble methinks in the Bayou Bucket game.
4. - aTm this year is a much more talented version of UH when Sumlin was at the helm. Great offense, sketchy defense. I didn't think they would be that bad against Bama.
5. - Oregon is pretty good. That is all.
6. - It's time to start the "Dan Mullen job watch" as Miss State loses yet another one.
7. - OU is steadily improving. With Bell at QB they could run for 700 yards against UT-Austin.
8. - TCU's struggles against the Big Twen lay bare the flaws in the "BCS Buster" arguments. Average teams having good seasons do not mean that they would be powers in power conferences. There's a reason Boise St. likes playing in the Mountain West.
9. - This is not your last year's Notre Dame team. Further evidence their cupcake schedule every year keeps them falsely in the B(C)S conversation and will keep them falsely in the 4 team playoff conversation going forward.
And finally.....
10. - Michigan is 3-0, but 1-2 against the spread. Furthermore their defense looks closer to the Rich Rod days than it does the days when Jarrett Irons and Charles Woodson roamed. The people that seem happiest about this? Oddly enough, K-State fans, who deluged my twitter feed with insults while the team was struggling against Akron. As I said on Twitter, I would love it if K-State would get a bowl match-up with Michigan this year so we could pants them but alas, the chances of the Wildcats becoming bowl eligible this year seem remote.
On to week 4 with some momentum. Let's see if we can keep it going.
