College football lookahead is the essential grab bag of numbers, trends, reads and concepts each Monday throughout the season. Join us inside as we question the optimism surrounding Ohio State heading into its first real test, judge one team's big Saturday win meaningless for its future, and check in on which teams are the biggest slayers of spreads and layers of eggs through two weeks.
Portfolio checkup
In portfolio checkup, we explore which teams we're buying and selling, and why.
Buy:
Two things are keeping Notre Dame's prices in check right now, and it's time to capitalize.
Sell:
Kentucky Wildcats
Mark Stoops won't get to end his tenure as Kentucky coach voluntarily like Rich Brooks did, but two aspects of his time in Lexington will stand out as parallels to the Brooks era. Stoops will leave Kentucky better than he found it, and he won't be able to fashion a relevant SEC contender.
Stoops has done wonders for the program on the recruiting, fundraising and facility-building fronts, but Kentucky has natural disadvantages that have cemented its historical place in the league pecking order. The program is still in the phase where it wildly celebrates rare wins over rebuilding league bullies. That's nowhere near contending.
Don't get carried away thinking that this 2018 Kentucky team is different because of one road win over an opponent who didn't offer SEC-caliber resistance. Florida is a bad football team in its second game of a program overhaul under a brand new staff. Stoops has amply demonstrated that however much he's raised the talent level -- and therefore the bar for Kentucky's A-game -- he can't get his team to play consistently enough week after week to be a factor in the SEC race. Stoops' Wildcats will always be prone to weeks where poor weekday practices and gaffe-filled Saturdays prevail. The SEC East is weak, and some team may emerge from the division with a gaudy record yet be largely a fraud. If it looks like it might be the Cats, don't buy the hype.
Hold:
Duke Blue Devils
Heading onto this season, the Duke offense looked like the best in a decade. David Cutcliffe has sent pupils Erik Ainge, Thaddeus Lewis, Sean Renfree, Anthony Boone and Thomas Sirk on to NFL contracts in the past decade, but it's 6-foot-5, 220-pound redshirt junior Daniel Jones who is the best quarterback Cutcliffe has fielded since he last coached a Manning. Jones is smart, strong-armed, accurate, mobile and physical -- and unfortunately just broke his collarbone at Northwestern, a game in which the Devils also lost preseason All-America safety Mark Gilbert to a season-ending injury.
Jones was the team's leader and best player, and Gilbert's loss is a huge blow that further thins a defense already hit with injuries. The postgame injury news is as bad as any team has received so far this year. Most would show some sort of collapse in the face of this kind of adversity, but Duke is one of two ACC teams (along with Boston College) that stood out in fall camp as having the potential for some really special chemistry. We like this outfit's mojo as well as defensive depth that is finally strong enough to weather an injury or two, and we are eager to watch and see if Duke is tough enough to keep its season on the rails after a fatal blow to what were legitimate conference championship aspirations. Understand that Duke's ceiling is much, much lower now, but also that this crew deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to whether the oddsmakers have adjusted appropriately for life without Jones.
Those backing Duke this week can take solace in Cutcliffe's strong ATS records on the road generally, the nonconference road slate specifically and also in the second of consecutive road games.
Slate standout
Slate standout provides games that we'll be studying closely this week and what we're looking for out of the contest.
Ohio State Buckeyes (-13) at TCU Horned Frogs
First there was the departure of J.T. Barrett, Billy Price and the rest of a crucial core of seniors that have led Ohio State for the past three seasons. Then came a scandal. A cover-up at Big Ten media days. A lengthy investigation. Deleted texts. A suspension for a Hall of Fame coach. Significant public backlash. A university trustee resigning in protest.
Where is the optimism coming from? A serious question for those bullish on the Buckeyes: What about this whole scenario makes you think "Gee, sure looks like it's shaping up to be Ohio State's year!"
It's not like the first two weeks changed anything. Ohio State was already universally expected to destroy the first two teams on its schedule while displaying an explosive offense with a dizzying array of skill players. None of that is new. It was hard enough being the hunted in college football's toughest division. Now a team rebuilding its leadership is thrust into a distracting crisis that requires superior leaders. We're guessing that the real source of the optimism -- and this week's bloated price -- has nothing to do with 2018. It's the 73-8 record of a guy who won't be coaching the game this week.
Plus, this already profiles as one of the few spots that hasn't been good to Urban Meyer's Buckeyes. September setbacks to Virginia Tech and Oklahoma account for two of Ohio State's eight losses in six years under Meyer, and two of the closest calls of Meyer's 73 wins at Ohio State came in early-season nonconference tilts with Navy and Northern Illinois.
Gary Patterson is 21-12 ATS as an underdog and lives for these spots. We'll be watching both teams with an open mind this week for any sign that we shouldn't take the points, but it's doubtful we'll find it. It certainly won't be because the Frogs don't know how to handle hosting ESPN's College Gameday; they're 6-0 when the show comes to town.
Handicapper's toolbox
Handicapper's toolbox will provide a different concept every Monday, along with how to apply it on Saturday.
Playing well on the opposite coast is always a challenge, but it's especially tough when an East Coast team has a late kickoff in the Pacific time zone or a Western Coast team has an early start back east.
There are countless example of home-and-home series between teams from opposite coasts where the school hosting the first meeting deliberately schedules the game as early or late as possible to gain an advantage, and then the other retaliates in kind the following year. Unsurprisingly, teams in that spot haven't fared so well.
In Week 1, 40-point underdog Oregon State went to the Eastern time zone for an early kickoff and fell behind Ohio State 42-7 in the second quarter en route to a 77-31 drubbing, while double-digit favorite Navy lost a late-starting affair at Hawai'i.
Last week, Nevada was rolled at Vanderbilt in an early game, while Michigan State and Connecticut were the wrong sides in their late-slate losses at Arizona State and Boise State.
This week, take heed of the kickoff time for Hawai'i at Army: it's 7 a.m. Hawaii time. The Warriors are 2-8 all time in Eastern time zone after topping UMass last year, but that game was the opener, with plenty of time to prepare and arrive early to acclimate.
Chalk bits
Chalk bits will provide observations, issues, clues and questions from around each week's slate.
Several games this week have seen their prices move a touchdown from the Westgate's Games of the Year released in the summer. Missouri and Purdue was a pick-em back then; now the Tigers are laying 7.5. Florida State was a 9.5-point road favorite at Syracuse two months ago, but now that number has been trimmed to 2.5. And Oklahoma is now laying 18 on the road at Iowa State, as opposed to the early line of 11 released in July.
Looking for a team the oddsmakers haven't adjusted to yet?
Here's the group that's defying the line by the widest margin: Utah State, Vanderbilt, Cincinnati and Boise State are the four teams that have played two FBS teams, are 2-0 against the spread and have covered those games by an average of more than 20 points. On the flip side of that, only Arizona and Old Dominion are 0-2 ATS versus FBS teams and have failed to cover by an average of more than 20 points.
Dino Babers is one of the more pointspread-conscious head coaches in the sport, and you can bet he's letting his team know that Florida State is a road favorite in the Carrier Dome this week despite the fact that his team is the one that looks improved from a season ago when the Orange lost by a field goal in Tallahassee as a mere six-point road dog. Babers told Cuse fans when he took over the program that his offense should be clicking by game four of year three. Well, that's a week away, and the offense certainly looks good so far with 117 points in high-flying covers over Western Michigan and Wagner.
There's no evidence that Florida State is not awful, let alone improved from last year or actually any good. Still, the Noles are chalk on long-term form, and Babers will no doubt be playing the no-respect card to make sure that his team isn't thinking about the truth, which is that Florida State looks like a team that his Orange could beat by just going through the motions.
UTEP was pegged by several power ratings as the worst team in the FBS this year. The Miners' futility is no secret -- they haven't scored more than 24 points since 2016, have lost 14 straight games and have gained more than 287 yards just once in that span (so you'd think that the oddsmakers would have caught up). Yet UTEP hasn't covered a number since an inspired effort in Mike Price's first game after taking over as interim coach in Week 5 last year.
Doug Martin learned to appreciate the New Mexico-New Mexico State rivalry the hard way, taking a 66-17 whipping from Bob Davie's Lobos in his first season as Aggies head coach. Since then Martin has emphasized this game, and the results have been two wins and four covers in four tries, all as underdogs, with three of the four games decided by a field goal or less.
Utah and Washington didn't play in 2014, Chris Peterson's first year at Montlake, but since then they've met every season, with Utah covering all three as underdogs. That trio of games is just part of Utah's impressive 12-3 record as an underdog in that span, with half of those covers outright wins as well.
West Virginia saw heavy action right away Sunday night, moving from underdog to favorite at NC State. Be sure to track the effects of Hurricane Florence as it bears down on the Carolina coast before jumping on the Mountaineers. It's coming up on the two-year anniversary of the Pack's 10-3 takedown of Notre Dame on a waterlogged field during Hurricane Matthew, and a big, physical N.C. State team could have an edge over their more aerially-oriented Big 12 foe if the weather is wet.