Sportswagers
Ohio State vs Oregon
Ohio State +180 over Oregon
College Football Playoff National Championship Game – AT&T Stadium, Dallas, TX
8:30 PM EST. If this bowl season taught us anything, it is that the Big-10 was the most undervalued and underrated conference in the country. All 10 Big-10 teams that played in a bowl game this year were a dog, which reveals how disrespected this conference was. This Ohio State team is not like other teams you have seen in major bowls in years’ past. This is a team that was on the outside looking in for most of the 2014-15 season. The pre-season, season-ending injury to Braxton Miller, coupled with an early loss to Virginia Tech at the Horseshoe all but wrote off any hopes for the Buckeyes’ playoff chances, yet with a second-string quarterback they managed to earn a Big 10 championship opportunity. Matters would get worse, as the Buckeyes would lose rising star J.T Barrett, who literally carried the team on his shoulders in Millers’ absence. OSU was forced to face a talented Wisconsin team with a third-string quarterback. The Buckeyes would rise to the challenge and prevail and do so convincingly, thumping the Badgers 59-0 and earning the fourth seed in the inaugural college football playoff. Once again, this team found itself as a heavy dog against the most prominent team in the land, the Alabama Crimson Tide. Trailing by 15 points, the Buckeyes would surge buck and upset the Tide in an instant classic.
With the hype surrounding Marcus Mariota and Oregon’s dominance of the Pac-12, it will be interesting to see how this Oregon team performs when they have an opponent that will take it to them like no other. The Buckeyes have a very talented defensive front and a rugged rusher in Ezekiel Elliot, both of whom can serve as an antidote to stymie and mitigate a prolific Oregon attack. The real edge is outside the lines, though, as Ohio State has far, far better coaching than an Oregon staff that can claim only two combined years of experience at its top three positions. Offensive coordinator Scott Frost had never called a play until last year. Career position coach Don Pellum is in his first year in charge of a defense that Nick Aliotti had headed since 1999 and Mark Helfrich is a 40-year-old second-year boss that has never coached a game of this magnitude. You can’t take anything away from the Ducks because of what they have accomplished this year but we see it as more of them overwhelming teams with their lightning fast offense that moves like jack-rabbits. Urban Meyer will have an answer. He’ll have a game plan to slow the game down and use Oregon’s quick-strike offense against them. Oregon’s defense is brutally awful and defenses this bad usually don’t win championships. Oregon’s defense was shredded for 440 yards to a ham-and-egg Wyoming offense. When the Ducks faced Michigan State (another Big-10 power), State had more first downs (25-19) and racked up nearly 500 yards of total offense. A late collapse by the Spartans did them in but MSU did have a 27-18 lead with 4 minutes left in the third quarter before the collapse. This Ducks defense ranks in the nation's bottom 10 in third-down conversions and first downs allowed, as well as forcing three-and-outs and opponent drives of 10 plays or more. The Ducks defense has allowed a whopping 440 yards to all but one FBS opponent this year and if you don’t think Urban Meyer won’t exploit that you are dead wrong.
Meyer has been an underdog 27 times in his coaching career and after upsetting the Tide, he's now an amazing 22-5 against the spread on those occasions. The best coaching mind in the country is not going to get out-coached or outwitted by a second year man that puts all his focus on offense.
Take the points if you like but we’re very likely going to play the Buckeyes on the money line unless it goes to +7 in which case we’ll take the points. We will wait until after dinner to bet this one because if the number comes down we don’t care because we’re playing the money line but if the late action is one-sided on the chalk, we may be able to grab 7. Either way, we’re playing the dog and we will update our official play sometime after dinner.
