We're underdogs in 5 of 8 games available to bet

To me the Ark and LSU lines are totally WTF. I would also make Bama & Aurburn bigger favorites.

Lines are set to bring action and I see those bringing plenty.

Alabama could be looking at a bit of a down year, and Arkansas looks primed for a breakout year.

Sounds like 2012

Here's my take on that. Any time EVERYONE in the media and the message boards agrees that Team X is "THE darkhorse" or "will break out" or "going to make a huge leap forward" they're going to disappoint. The only reason there's such lock-step in thinking on Arkansas is because of the echo-chamber effect and at this point there's no real analysis of them going on any more. They went on a tear at the end of the year. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to play them then, but that was a year ago. The momentum doesn't always carry over, and they lost some of the essential pieces on the line. We were unstoppable at the end of Sumlin's first year and then the next year, meh. We steamrolled over NU, OU and UT to end 2010 and then went 6-6 in 2011. I'm not saying Arkansas isn't going to beat us, but that the idea of them with all 2 and 3 star talent being basically as good as 5 star everywhere Alabama, in their second year of a new offense, with Saban still coaching, is stupid and symptomatic of a kind of hysteria in favor of Arkansas that seems to be everywhere right now.

quote:

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9/5 (-3) vs Arizona St ** Houston
9/26 (+6.5) vs Arkansas ** Arlington
10/3 (-6.5) Mississippi St
10/17 (+7) Alabama
10/24 (+4) @ Ole Miss
10/31 (-10) South Carolina
11/7 (+1.5) Auburn
11/28 (+7.5) @ LSU

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I look at this, and aside from the memes that EVERYONE is going with in the off-season (which are that Arkansas is unstoppable and State will suck bad), this is nothing but how each team did last year. There's no sophisticated thinking behind these.

They looked at A&M and ASU and said "they finished last year about as good as each other, but the game is in Houston, so A&M by a field goal".

Bama is Bama and will win.

Ole Miss beat them last year.

A&M depansed SCAR last year, so they'll do it again.

Auburn's loss last year was a fluke no one saw coming, so Auburn will win a close on thsis year

LSU owns Aggie, so LSU wins easily.

That's it. That's all they did. No more fine-grained thinking than looking at last year and applying the two over-riding memes (Arky awesome, State bad)

Arizona State is going to be like South Carolina last year

Azst replaces both tackles, I think Myles and DaeDae are gon' eat