I won my Wednesday Best Bet on Central Florida (posted on the The Huffington Post) and I also won my Thursday night Best Bet on Kansas State, who won 59-7. I'm now 20-9-1 on my College Best Bets for the season and I have 12 Best Bets on Saturday. You can get information about my weekly Best Bets at drbobsports.com. I also have free analysis on 36 College games and 10 NFL games (NFL free analysis is an incredible 38-12-1 so far this year) in my Free Analysis Section.
Here's one of my Best Bets for later in the day.
***Iowa State (+23 ½) 26 OKLAHOMA 38
Oklahoma may be undefeated and ranked 6th in the nation but the Sooners simply aren't a dominant team this season. Oklahoma has only played one really impressive game, their 47-17 win over Florida State, and they've escaped with close wins against Utah State (31-24), Air Force (27-24), Cincinnati (31-29) and against an overrated Texas team (28-20) in a game in which they were out-played 4.3 yards per play to 5.9 yppl and won because of a +2 turnover margin. For the season the Sooners are averaging just 5.1 yards per play against teams that would allow 5.1 yppl to an average team and their defense is actually worse than average in allowing 5.9 yppl to teams that would combine to average 5.5 yppl against an average team. Despite worse than average yppl stats, the Sooners are actually a better than average team because they average 83 plays per game while allowing 70 plays and they have good special teams, but they are certainly not a top-10 team and I wouldn't even rank them in my top-20. Iowa State just lost 27-68 at home to a very good Utah team, but the Cyclones beat up on Texas Tech 52-38 the week before that and they are certainly not bad enough to merit a line above 21 points. In fact, Iowa State's decent offensive attack (5.2 yppl against teams that would allow 5.3 yppl to an average team) should move the ball pretty well against Oklahoma's sub-par defense and the Cyclones haven't been too bad on defense this season, allowing 6.1 yppl to teams that would combine to average 5.8 yppl against an average defensive team. That's actually just 0.3 yppl worse than Oklahoma's mediocre offensive rating. Iowa State will likely be without RB Alexander Robinson this week, but Robinson's 5.1 ypr on 88 carries looks like it can be adequately replaced by Shontrelle Johnson and Jeff Woody, who combine to average 5.9 ypr on their 55 runs this season (5.3 ypr if I take out their yards against Utah's second string defense last week, which of course I do). My math model projects Oklahoma with 15 more plays than Iowa State and a 548 yards at 6.3 yppl to 391 yards at 5.5 yppl advantage, but that's not enough to justify such a high line even after accounting for Oklahoma's advantage in projected turnovers and a slight edge in special teams. In fact, my math favors Oklahoma by just 17 ½ points in this game and Iowa State's blowout loss last week sets the Cyclones up in a very good 24-0 ATS subset of a 75-16 ATS bounce-back situation that plays on big road dogs after getting embarrassed in their previous game. I'll take Iowa State in a solid 3-Star Best Bet at +21 points or more.