Re: Week 1 Picks
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3 units - Fla Int'l +11 -110 at MTSU (Bowman's)
3 units - Toledo +7.5 -103 at Iowa St. (Pinny)
2 units - Miss. St. +7 -113 vs S. Carolina (Pinny)
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2-1-0 +3.64 units YTD
Pretty nice start to the season... Fla Int'l was an easy winner. I was SO scared that Toledo was going to make me pay for guessing wrong about the line move... They looked like the right side as well; game was even as far as yardage and Cochran is clearly a stud (as is Bret Meyer; ISU O-line played surprisingly well too). I may not fade Iowa St. as hard as I had intended to early; Toledo is a really good team, so I'm kinda impressed with ISU's performance.
I watched the Miss St. game and am still not sure what to make of it. I don't think it was as much of a mismatch as the score indicated; every pivotal aspect just happened to go USC's way. Both teams have terrible PK's; USC's goes 3-3 and MSU's goes 0-1. MSU should have blocked a punt and gave up a huge gain instead. MSU also dropped a pass inside the USC 5 that would have led to some points. Once MSU missed the 4th down conversion and gave up the TD on the trick play, they looked pretty bad for the rest of the game, but I think they might have been able to sustain it a bit longer if demoralizing things didn't keep happening. But, that has to be expected to a degree when you are taking the worse team, so I definitely wouldn't call MSU a "right" side here.
As pathetic as MSU was, though, I think I would be pretty worried if I was a USC fan... MSU's O-line isn't that great, but they ran the ball pretty effectively, even against 8 or 9 guys in the box. USC's offense didn't look very good either. I'm OK with how the game turned out, because people are going to point to the final margin and think that this makes USC legit. Personally, I thought they looked like a second-rate team that is going to get throttled when they have to play real opponents (fortunately for USC, I don't know if the SEC East has any of those... [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]). But, before the season is over, I suspect that I'm going to fade USC a couple more times and end up recouping my losses from this game...
As a last note, I'm sure as hell not playing any overs this weekend. I thought all of the games FLEW by tonight. Should be good for underdogs also.
ML4L
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