I wish every week was like week 6 of the college football season. We have a nationally televised game every night this week. With only one game on the board each night I will hopefully get a chance to pick apart each one and see if I can find value on one side or the other. So far I’ve completed one games analysis and come up with a solid 1 unit play.

Tuesday October 2, 2007
Marshal +3 @ Memphis
This is an interesting game in that we are seeing two of the leagues worst defenses squaring off in what should be a quite emotional game. The Memphis Tigers are dealing with the loss of a teammate (Taylor Bradford) who was shot to death in what is believed to have been a targeted murder. While he was not active this year in any games he was reported to be a popular player and the team is devastated over his death. It’s hard to say what emotional effect this will have on the team but here is a little inside info, that you can do what you want in your consideration.

Taylor Bradford was known to be a big time gambler. An insider told us he had about $10K in cash on him at the time of his death and had spent the weekend casino gambling. This same insider shared that the Memphis team are big partiers who really admired, or were at least fascinated by Bradfords lifestyle. The team partied with him on a regular basis having late night beer bashes that lasted all weekend long (starting after game time obviously) and Bradford was quite likeable and very generous with his money. This was not like they lost some quiet walk-on member of the team to a murder which would have been difficult enough, Bradford was a friend to most of the team.

I don’t have sufficient data available to say how a team does a few days after the loss of a teammate but I do have enough data to show that Marshal is the correct play with the emotional effect aside.

Let’s take a quick look at some advantages for both teams.
Marshal:
The Marshal offense is superior to the Memphis defense. The reason Marshal has only scored 18.8 points per game has a lot to do with turn overs and penalties. While the coach probably does not have a magic wand to fix the turn over and penalty problem take a quick look at whom Marshal’s opponents were so far. They are 0-4 but they’ve had to face 3 superior teams this year in West Virginia, Miami FL and Cincinnati. Their offense should be good enough to put up around 31 points in this game against a weaker defense who is less likely to force turnovers then their previous opponents were (Though Memphis is +0.75 avg turn over differential this season but are 1-3 this season and have not played anywhere near the same type of opponents Marshal has). For comparison purposes” West Virginia held Maryland to just 7 points through almost the entire game until Maryland scored a garbage time TD for a nice backdoor push to those of us who got Maryland at the best line. Marshal (not even in the same league as Maryland) scored 23 on West Virginia. So again my point again is that Marshals offense is good enough against the Memphis defense.
As far as Marshals defense is concerned they are bad but their biggest weakness is stopping the run. The only little tidbit of info that Marshal has to be thankful for in the match up of their defense vs Memphis offense is that Memphis is not much of a running team and moves the ball more often through the air. This is not much of a plus because Marshal is still awful at stopping the pass but they outright suck big time at stopping the run.

Memphis: Favoring Memphis in this game is their home field advantage which is in fact real. Their stadium and fans create a real hostile environment for their opponents especially when they approach the Red Zone. The fact that Marshal is already prone to pre-snap penalty fouls gives Memphis perhaps their only real significant edge in this game.

With the entire emotional aspect aside this match up is extremely close but I give Marshal a 2 point advantage on a Neutral field. The true line for this game should be Marshal +1.5 maybe +2 at most. The fact we can get +3 @ -115 right now makes me heavily lean Marshal here.

This is a small edge but it’s an edge none the less. At -115 we need 53.50% to reach break even. When I ran the #’s I gave Marshal a 54% chance at +3. All of a sudden though I realized much to my delight that I missed something when analyzing this game:

Marshal has not played football since September 22 and has had plenty of time to rest and practice.
This is Memphis’s 3rd game in 10 days *unheard of for any football team let alone college*. They played on September 22, 27 and now October 2nd. They have no practiced at all afer their September 27th game; a game in which they went into the half up 31-6 and then lost 35-31 after being out scored 29 to zip in the second half. Now I’m not going to give any analysis on how the emotional effect of the murder might effect their performance in this game but will say: 3 games in 10 days after having dealt with all this and the fact the Memphis is a poor performing 2nd half team anyways.. These factors have to push the edge higher then 0.5% edge I already had an make it worthy of a 1 unit play.

So in final the play is:
Memphis +3 -115 (Bodog)