Re: Week 1 CFB Notions
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One other thing I wanted to mention is the Kentucky/Louisville game. Why do people like Kentucky here? Louisville always blows people out at Papa John's, and they look to have the most talented team in Petrino's tenure. They tend to let down in mid-season road games, but in a home opener against a rival, I'd expect them to win by at least 4 TDs. -22.5 sounds like a bargain to me.
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Louisville always blows out CUSA/Big East cupcakes at Papa John's, but for the Kentucky game the stadium will be at least half blue, so their homefield advantage will be largely negated (it's only a 42k seat stadium anyway - not like noise is a huge factor to begin w/).
Kentucky is returning most of their key players and should have their best team in 4 years, albeit that doesn't say much, and if Andre Woodson held onto the ball last year at the goal-line, Kentucky's woeful 3-8 squad likely would've beaten the 10-2 or whatever Cardinals.
Kentucky's biggest problems the last few years have been injuries and lack of depth from probation, but injuries won't be a problem for this game, and they've had 2 full recruiting classes since being off probation, so they have more scholarship players now than they've had in several years. Rafael Little, Tony Dixon, and Keenan Burton are big-time playmakers on offense, and Andre Woodson is a solid veteran QB. Defensively the front 7 will be very good and deep, secondary not so much.
U of L, while sporting perhaps the best offense in the country, probably will not be much better on defense than Kentucky. Brohm is coming off a torn ACL, and as with any such injury it is a little uncertain how he will react, and frankly I think he's pretty overrated to begin with. If Kentucky will bring guys up in the box to contain Bush and make Brohm beat them, I think they could potentially win this game. (I'm not sure they'll do that tho; Archer has been in love w/ playing these soft zones which I like to call the "blitz-none cover-none"...hopefully he'll come up w/ a better game-plan now that he has some better personnel.)
The line opened a couple weeks ago at 25, and I almost jumped on Kentucky there, but didn't because I wanted to make sure that the veteran Woodson is going to start at QB over the sophomore Pulley, and didn't anticipate such a drastic line move. I think Rich Brooks is staging a little faux QB controversy; Woodson is a good decision maker and accurate passer, but has a little bit of a fumbling problem, and all spring and summer Brooks has been talking up Pulley, who's more of a Marcus Vick-type running QB. Here it is less than a week before the game and he still hasn't named a starter; my take is you can expect to see Woodson taking almost all the snaps at QB against U of L, w/ Pulley taking an occasional snap at QB and seeing some time at WR. Brooks did the exact same thing when he had Lorenzen and Boyd in his first year; he's just not tipping his hand so U of L will have to be prepared for both styles, which is good from a strategic standpoint.
If that thought had occurred to me earlier I'd have hopped on UK at 25 and got a huge middle two weeks later w/ U of L -21.5, but oh well. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]
Cliff notes: U of L is a strong favorite, but 22.5 is too much, and 25 was WAY too much, as indicated by the line movement.
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