College football will deliver a huge slate of games in Week 10 with top-25 matchups galore, but what are the five bets that you can bank on?
Massive matchups with big-time postseason implications are in high order for Week 10 of the 2018 college football season. This is one of those weeks where the entire landscape of the sport could be shaken up depending on how things shake out. That certainly makes for an entertaining week of action, but it also does make prognostication a little bit more difficult.
Take, for instance, the matchup between the No. 1 Alabama Crimson Tide and the No. 3 LSU Tigers in Baton Rouge. Given how dominant Nick Saban’s team has been this season, the general assumption is that they are going to go on the road and continue to take care of business. At the same time, though, we haven’t seen this Crimson Tide group face an opponent anywhere near the caliber of LSU to this point. So while Alabama is the likely pick, they’re far from a lock, especially to cover a sizeable point spread.
Another example of this would be the No. 5 Michigan Wolverines welcoming the No. 14 Penn State Nittany Lions to Ann Arbor on Saturday. While Michigan has been the more consistent of the two teams, the lingering effects of disappointing in big games over the years hang over Jim Harbaugh’s team. Subsequently, it’s hard to say how that one is going to play out.
All of this is to say that, despite the number of marquee matchups on the slate for Week 10 of the college football season, very few of them are locks in terms of how things will play out. Having said that, there are some odds and lines that you can consider in that regard.
With that in mind, let’s get into the five best bets in college football for Week 10.
Note: All odds and lines are courtesy of Odds Shark.
5. Utah State (-19) at Hawaii Rainbow Warriors
One of the biggest discrepancies between the AP Top 25 poll and the initial College Football Playoff rankings that were released this week is with the Utah State Aggies. The 7-1 team out of the Mountain West Conference comes in as the 18th-ranked team in the country according to the former, but didn’t even crack the top 25 for the CFP ranks.
On their way to their one-loss season through eight games, Utah State and quarterback Jordan Love have been one of the most explosive offensive teams in the country. Their 49.4 points per game average ranks third in the country, and they’ve been putting up big numbers against Mountain West competition and out-of-conference opponents alike. Put simply, this team can put up numbers against anyone that they’re going to play.
In Week 10, they’re going out into the Pacific Ocean for a matchup with Cole McDonald and the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors, another team that has shown that they can put up a lot of points, but also a team that has been inconsistent. More recently, Hawaii has actually just been lackluster as a whole, losing their last three games (BYU, Nevada, Fresno State) by an average of 24.7 points.
Subsequently, I don’t have any faith that the Rainbow Warriors are going to put up that great of a fight against this Utah State team. This might be a shootout (the oddsmakers think so with the Over/Under topping 70 points), but the Aggies are clearly the superior team in this matchup and should win pretty comfortably, covering the 19-point spread.