15
DEC
2016

NCAAF December 17th

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NCAAF Season: 53-46-3, (53.54%) +2.4 UnitsĀ 

The regular season ended in the black at about 53.5% and a few units of profit. Certainly nothing special, but winning is winning. Now I’ll look to add on a bit during bowl season which starts on Saturday. Here’s what I’ve got for day one…

Houston (-3.5): After Tom Herman left UH a few weeks ago I was ready to fade Houston in whatever bowl game they went to, against whatever team they faced. Now however after promoting Major Applewhite from within I’ve done a 180 and will take Houston instead. I think these kids are going to be very inspired and pumped up to play for Herman. I also expect they’ll be a bit of a “we don’t need Herman” type of attitude from the Cougars in this one. When this team is clicking and focused they’ve proven they can be very dangerous, just ask Oklahoma and Louisville about that. On the SDSU side all the focus will be on RB Donnell Pumphrey who is 108 yards away from becoming the all time leading rusher in College Football history. It’s also a homecoming for Pumphrey who played his High School ball in Vegas. You can bet he’ll want this bad, and his teammates will want it for him. One small problem though… the Houston run defense. The Cougars this year were the 3rd best team in the nation against the run allowing only 98 rush yards per game, and 2nd best in the nation allowing only 2.9 yards per carry. This is a classic strength vs. strength game as that Houston defense will not only deal with Pumphrey, but his backup Rashad Penny. This year Penny ran for 995 yards, 11 TD’s and 7.9 yards per carry. Those are pretty insane numbers for a backup RB. Point being, the Aztecs are a run, run, run team and if Houston can take that away it’s big trouble. SDSU QB Christian Chapman is just a game manager. He only averages 18.4 pass attempts and 144 passing yards per game. For the most part he’s just there to give the ball to Pumphrey and Penny. If he’s asked to do more the Aztecs are in real trouble. At the end of the day I’m going to take my chances with the playmaking ability of Greg Ward Jr, the great Houston run defense, and them being pumped up to play for Applewhite. Houston wins by double digits.

UTSA (+7.5): To many I’m sure taking New Mexico, the number one rushing team in the nation in what’s basically a home game is going to look pretty damn good. I’m going to go the other way though. New Mexico runs a triple option attack which has been very successful for them this year, no way around it. One nice advantage they have in the regular season though is teams only have one week to prepare for that attack. In this game UTSA will have had 3 weeks to prepare. Generally the longer a team has to prepare for an offense like this the better they’ll do. UTSA was an above average run defense to begin with this season, and with that extra time to prepare I think they can somewhat hold this ground game of the Lobos in check. Defensively New Mexico is nothing special and I don’t see UTSA having much trouble finding their way to 28-35 points or so. If they do indeed find their way to that total I’ll trust that the defense is prepared enough to keep New Mexico from going crazy enough to cover this number.

Nothing on the other 3 games for me as I don’t have much of a feel for them.

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