The Close Ones
So here’s the situation, in all its haunting friability. While most of the country was gearing up to watch Notre Dame at Ohio State last Saturday, the Appalachian State at North Carolina game was featuring some defensive players showing their coaches plenty of things to work on in practice. The spread I locked in at, I believe to have been the best it would get last week, +1.5 to take App State in a game I’m pretty sure they were favored to win by game time. And they got up early! It was 21-7, nice, but wouldn’t last long as something like the next 4 touchdowns were all UNC, plus a couple of field goals, and it was looking a little bleak. Then the comeback, a little back and forth and boom, Appalachian St “tied” it at 56, or they were set to anyway, pending the extra point. But I’d been waiting for this ever since they got within a touchdown because I knew that should they get that last score with little enough time left, there was a very good chance they were going for 2, and with the extra point and a half in my pocket, that’s a winner either way; either they win by 1 or they lose by 1. And they did just that! Hallelujah, I was about to go 4-1 on the week. They probably should have taken the lead there, but they didn’t as the ball soared over the receiver’s head on a seemingly easy pass to convert, but never mind that, I’m not here to celebrate Appalachian State wins or North Carolina losses, I’m here to win picks and by all appearances that’s exactly what had just unfolded before us, well, before me anyway; everyone else was probably already onto the Ohio State game.
The last 30 seconds felt like looking into my fish trap and finding leaches (Sam from Alone, anyone?). App State attempted the onside kick and failed, no biggie, except the UNC dude that recovered it did so still standing and remained upright all the way to the endzone. If he grabs it and sits his team wins and so do I, but he’s a college kid and wanted his touchdown, which he would get, and then App State would get one too (!) as North Carolina still hadn’t figured the defense thing out, if even for like 28 seconds, and my win turned loss turned win turned loss had a chance of turning into overtime with one more attempt at a two point conversion. Failure again, my second loss of the week.
Amazing losses are always the most memorable; I’ll probably be talking about that game nobody else was watching for the rest of the season. But I don’t bring this up now to lament the bad luck. I could easily just look at my 4-5 week, and be satisfied that I was about .500 in my first week of the season, with the one extra loss being of the extraordinary type. Could have easily been 5-4, right? I guess, and I don’t want to be a pessimist already, but that’s not how I look at it. There have been and are going to be many, many games in which the oddsmakers are about spot on, and if not the spread exactly, college football chaos has to land somewhere on one side or the other of it. The sample size on those is so large that I figure win or lose, they’re really more like flipping coins and in the end I’m going to win about as many of them as I lose. My Purdue loss was one of those as well, but so will be many of my wins. Now, I’m not sure if my Central Michigan, Western Michigan and Clemson wins qualify as chaos, but it’s not like they all felt great from the start. Luck is an essential element to gambling, but again, I’m not into gambling, I want value and a lot of it. I can take heart in my East Carolina pick, a game in which I was spotted 11.5 points and they damn near won the game outright, shutting out North Carolina State in the second half, but in doing so I have to acknowledge that I also picked South Florida, Memphis and Louisville, and they all got shellacked.
That’s what I look at, then, more than anything else. I’m 1-3 in games I need to win about 3 out of every 5 of to get back to where I want to be. Not a great start. I need boat races in my favor and instead I got the opposite. To be fair to myself, this could just be the nature of underdogs, and finding value in a spread simply being too high might not always have all the good feels all the time. Maybe I should give myself more credit, at least for the Michigan schools. This is, after all, what the second scale is there to do and if there was a silver lining over the weekend, it’s that I would have been 2-6 without the introduction of the new metric, so perhaps the system is doing what it is supposed to do, mitigating the damage in weeks that there just isn’t much value to be found by the approach I take to seeking it out. There are weeks like that for me in even the best of seasons and the key is winning by more in the winning weeks than the amount I lose by in the bummers, which makes this a fairly digestible losing week. That said, it’s been 3 years now since I had that way ahead feeling and I so badly want to feel the same about this as I do every time I booster up; I want to mutter to myself once again, “I’m done with you Covid,” even here. Maybe it begins this week, here are my picks:
Georgia State +7.5 at home vs North Carolina
Army +2.5 at home vs Texas San Antonio
Western Michigan -6.5 at Ball State
Air Force -18 at home vs Colorado
Maryland -27 at Charlotte
Navy +6.5 at home vs Mamphis
Liberty +6.5 at home vs UAB
Oklahoma State -11 at home vs Arizona State
Baylor 3.5 at BYU
There are a couple of games tonight, but none to my liking. I’ll post on social media if there is a late add tomorrow, but for now we’ll just assume that it’s 9 games again, a number that will inevitably be going up as programs run out of FCS level games on the schedule. 5-4 this week would get me to even, which I’d be satisfied with for the low sample size start, but naturally I’d much prefer profit land at 6-3 or even 7-2, which would get me back to my standard of old.
