College Football Week 5 Upset Picks: How is Old Dominion an Underdog?

• After another positive week for the SBD Upsets Picker, we’re back for Week 5
• Yes, we’re picking Washington State again
• Unfortunately, Kentucky is not an underdog this week

Last week was another up week for us, and I’m starting to regret not putting my own money on this. At least we’re making you money!

Week 4 Upset Picks Results

We hit on just one of our picks, which put us up for the week again. We’re now up 7.55 units on the season.

Week 5 Upset Picks

I love that we’re up for the season. Let’s keep it going!

Florida State Seminoles at Louisville Cardinals

Both these teams are bad! I’m picking the home team. If there’s anything I’ve learned from this picker, it’s that keeping it simple and not thinking too much usually gets the job done.

Here’s Florida State getting beat 30-7 by Syracuse. Note the essentially non-functional offensive line:

There’s plenty of video out there about how bad Louisville is, too. You can go find that yourself.

The point is that when two bad teams play each other, weird, unpredictable stuff happens. Making the road team the favorite in those circumstances seems silly, so we’ll happily take Louisville as a home dog.

This is also going to be fun to watch, because  a bunch of wildly talented players wandering around a field without any order or direction is why we got into college football in the first place.

Utah Utes at Washington State Cougars

Yes, we got burned picking Washington State as narrow underdogs last week. However, that was a road game for the Cougars, and we’ve learned our lesson: home dogs only in the SBD Upset Picker.

For what it’s worth, Utah is a really good team. I’ll give them that. They play well on the lines, and they’ve done something very cool with recruiting a lot of Pacific Islanders. It’s worked out well for them.

However, they should not be road favorties in this game. They’ve massaged their numbers by beating lesser opponents and playing very efficient football, and didn’t make much of an impression against Washington.

Washington State, which is not known for its easy efficiency, nearly beat USC on the road last week.

Old Dominion Monarchs at East Carolina Pirates

Forget what I said about road dogs.

Old Dominion were one of the most exciting teams in college football last week, and beat the devil out of Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech entered that game ranked #13 and favored by 28.5 points. What came next was one of the biggest upsets in the history of college football.

If you dig into it, you’ll find that this wasn’t just any huge upset. Old Dominion didn’t score a bunch on wonky turnovers and blown special teams plays. They actually didn’t score at all on special teams, other than seven PAT’s.

They just threw for 495 yards and four touchdowns, and let Jermaine Cox do the rest. It was wild to watch, in that Old Dominion was thoroughly the better team.