A year ago, Western Michigan walked into a Big Ten stadium in the first week of the season and turned the afternoon into a rock fight. Michigan State couldn’t score. The total closed at 50 and the game produced 29 points. Then the Spartans beat Boston College 42-40 the following week.
That is the trade this week: One weekend into the season we have the loudest information grab the market gets all year, and it arrives with almost nothing to weigh it against. A team looks broken for three hours, everyone adjusts and the next number is set by an audience that has watched one game and remembered all of it. The interesting question is whether that adjustment is correct, and you can measure it.
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Since 2016, there have been 241 cases of a team whose Week 1 game finished 14 or more points under its closing total; their Week 2 games went over 143 of those 241 times, a shade under 60%, with a median landing nearly three points clear of the number. The baseline for every Week 2 game total in that span is 49.7 percent.
I am hunting early bets on market overreactions headed into Week 2.
Michigan beat Western Michigan 13-12 in Ann Arbor on Saturday night. The total closed at 46.5 and the game produced 25 points. Same opponent, same conference, same ugly first Saturday that Michigan State had a year ago, and the market has responded the same way: this total opened at 46.5 and now sits at 43.5.
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Three points is a lot. It is also a strange three points, because the offense that will decide this game had nothing to do with the afternoon that moved it. Oklahoma hung an easy 51 on UTEP, with quarterback John Mateer throwing for 225 yards and three scores before the backups came on in the third quarter. That offense has plenty of big-play ability, and if Michigan has a shot to stay in this one it’s going to have to match some form of production. We make this total 49.8 points, split between Oklahoma 27.3 and Michigan 22.5.
There is a case against the over and it is tempo. Michigan grinds, Oklahoma is not much quicker and fewer possessions is a genuine headwind. But after what happened in Week 1, Michigan’s offense could certainly use a 180-degree approach and play with more tempo than we saw.
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Bet: Oklahoma-Michigan over 43.5 (-103)
Georgia Tech lost 14-13 to Colorado. Their total closed at 51.5 and the game delivered 27 points. Another “oh boy, should we worry?” from a Georgia Tech offense that had offseason hype. I am not selling just yet.
Look at how that game actually ended: Colorado scored with 42 seconds left, and Georgia Tech answered by moving into field-goal range before a 45-yard FG attempt was blocked. That is a coin flip, not a collapse. Alberto Mendoza, in his first start after transferring in from Indiana, went 17-of-23 for 237 yards.
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Our projection is 62.5 points in this one(Tennessee 34.5 and Georgia Tech 28.0). Tennessee’s offense was never in question, so nothing on that half of the ledger got marked down, which leaves Georgia Tech’s 13-point afternoon carrying the entire adjustment by itself and asks you to believe that a team the market still respects enough to make only a 13-point home underdog has simultaneously forgotten how to score. Those two things are hard to hold at once.
I’m not running to tell you Colorado’s defense is good and Georgia Tech deserves leeway, but it’s Week 1 with a new quarterback. In a fight against Tennessee you have to be ready for big plays, and the Week 1 reaction opened value for us on the over.
Bet: Tennessee-Georgia Tech over 55.5 (+106)
Boise State went to Eugene and lost 34-27 in one of the most impressive opening performances of the year, and this is the spot where I do the opposite of the last two games: I am buying on the assumption the market didn’t move enough.
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The Broncos were 24.5-point underdogs and lost by seven. Oregon opened the season ranked second in the country with the second-shortest national title odds on the board at +650, and Boise went shot for shot with them in their building. The eye test and the number agree: this team is legit.
On the other side, Memphis has played twice — opening by winning outright at UNLV as a 4.5-point underdog and then beating Arkansas State 42-24 as a 10-point favorite — and while both of those are covers, the second is the narrower one, which is the sort of quiet step backward that tells me the market may have bought the hype a shade faster than the team earned it. Two games in also starts to add up in the fatigue department. That is not the state I want to be in walking into Boise.
The argument against Boise State if that if the Broncos had played worse you would be getting them under a touchdown here, so I am buying a relative high on a great performance. From everything I have seen, though, I believe it is well worth the buy on the Broncos.
Bet: Boise State -7.5 (-108)
