College Football Picks
Week 10. November. Daylight savings time. The college football season isn’t moving at warp speed, but it sure is humming right along. It is hard to believe that we are just a little over a month away from conference championship games. The one nice thing about the point of the season that we are at is we have a lot of data points, stats, and metrics to use for making these Week 10 college football picks.
This has also been a bit of a strange season in that we have some premier job openings with a lot of football left to be played and you know that the agents and sharks are circling the waters in search of transfers at season’s end. Teams that aren’t among the 20 or so contenders for College Football Playoff spots can be tough to gauge week in and week out, but all of that data should help us in that regard.
These are my favorite Week 10 college football picks, but we have many others. You can check out our Week 10 College Football Hub to see what others are taking and also to explore all of our college football tools, power ratings, and more. See our College Football Pro Picks page for more from my colleagues and broadcast guests.
Here are my Week 10 College Football Picks:
Odds as of Wednesday, October 29, 4:10 p.m. PT
Army at Air Force (PK, 49.5)
Noon ET (CBS)
Air Force enters this game with far, far, far and away the worst defense in the nation. They’ve allowed 7.79 yards per play. Rutgers is the next closest with 7.69 YPP, but the Falcons easily have the nation’s worst pass defense and are also among the worst run defenses in the country.
But, I have to think that knowing your opponent is going to run the ball like 90% of the time and do so with a scheme that you are very familiar with has to help, right? Army is fourth in the nation in rushing yards per game, but 69th in the nation in yards per carry.
Air Force, on the flip side, is second in rushing yards per game and 18th in yards per carry. Add in a QB in Liam Szarka who is actually capable of throwing a forward pass and it seems like the Falcons should really have the advantage here. Szarka is a guy I highlighted going into the game against UNLV in the middle of October. At that time, he had thrown for over 200 yards in three straight games, marking the first time that had happened for an Air Force QB since 2006. He fell 25 yards shy of being the first in who knows how long to have four straight.
Last game, Szarka was only 3-of-8 for 33 yards. I fully expect Air Force to have more passing game wrinkles here. The fact that they can throw a pass in a battle of option offenses has to count for something. Army has 599 passing yards. Szarka threw for basically 900 over a four-game stretch and wasn’t even the start at the beginning of the season.
I’ll take my chances here, especially with Army playing an elevation game in Colorado Springs with a brutal 10 a.m. kickoff.
Pick: Air Force PK
Virginia (-5, 53) at Cal
3:45 p.m. ET (ESPN2)
Charlottesville to California is quite a trek, as Virginia is out in Berkeley for the first time. The 7-1 Cavaliers have played two road games in North Carolina and one in Louisville. Now they’ll cross over three time zones to take on a Golden Bears team that started the season 3-0, but has alternated wins and losses to sit at 5-3 since then.
This Virginia team is due for a boatload of negative regression. Tony Elliott’s team has won their last four games by 14 combined points and three of them were overtime wins. They’ve fumbled nine times this season and haven’t lost a single one of them, joining Miami (2) and Texas A&M (4) as the only teams not to lose a fumble. Not surprisingly, they are +8 in TO margin and that has a lot to do with their record and their chance to be part of the CFP picture out of the ACC.
Maybe it won’t level off here against Cal, a team on the right side of fumble luck themselves with 10 balls on the turf and only two of them lost, but still. There are a lot of things stacking up against Virginia here between the travel and the good fortune. Cal’s two losses from earlier in the season to Duke and San Diego State are aging pretty well. Last week’s loss to Virginia Tech was sort of a schedule loss situation.
Cal can’t run the football a lick, but the Cavaliers have allowed under 3.7 yards per carry and are clearly a lesser pass defense than a rush defense, so that shouldn’t be a huge issue here.
Not only has Virginia won four one-score games in a row, but they’ve been outgained in all of them, three of them pretty significantly. I’ll take my chances with a five-point head start on the pup.
Pick: Cal +5
Wyoming at San Diego State (-10.5, 41.5)
7:00 p.m. ET
San Diego State is getting a ton of love right now based on what they’ve done over the last few weeks and how impressive their defensive numbers are. It looks like they get another strong matchup on paper here against Wyoming. But, I do want to look deeper into the Aztecs. San Diego State has faced the 133rd-ranked strength of opposing offenses per Brian Fremeau’s adjusted metrics at BCFToys.
Wyoming, who ranks just 12 spots behind San Diego State defensively, has faced the 59th-ranked set of opposing offenses. Quietly, Wyoming’s offense is around the national average in yards per play, as they’ve run the ball very effectively and Kaden Anderson has created a handful of explosive plays in the passing game.
The Cowboys have had their defensive numbers skewed by a couple of data points, as Utah ran for nearly seven yards per carry against them and they also just faced Air Force’s run-heavy offense. San Diego State has faced a couple of the Mountain West’s worst offenses in Colorado State and Nevada.
Wyoming getting a double-digit head start in a game where points are expected to be at a premium with an Aztecs team that looks a little bit overrated right now is very intriguing to me.
Pick: Wyoming +10.5
For more best bets and Week 9 College Football content, click here.
