good morning degenerate gamblers. today's market curiosity comes to us from columbus, ohio where the battered buckeyes butt heads with the other team up north and friendly foe mark dantonio. after their big win against the pedsters when they won outright but missed covering the 6.5 points they were laying, the bucks were in a precocious spot traveling to perennially bland iowa city after a very intense & emotional comeback victory, and they promptly [Mark May] all over themselves in their worst performance since the playoff game last season when dabo's fake ass embarrassed them with one of the best schemed football games you will ever see. fuck dabo tho..dude is an all-time douchebag.
ohio state was steamed up from -16 on the opener to ultimately laying 20 points to iowa at kick and if you laid that number, lol. 16 is understandable, 17 or more is not. you shouldn't have really expected to lose outright, certainly not that badly, but laying 3 touchdowns in that spot was asking to get taken to the shed. hawkeyes can take solace in their miserable existence with the win, and kirk ferentz has once again solidified his 48th consecutive big ten coach-of-the-year award, interestingly having had just 3 winning seasons in the stretch. fuck ferentz.
today is a new week, however, and once again brutus is laying a big number to a familiar divisional opponent. sparty is coming off an emotional victory of their own after handing the pedsters back-to-back losses on a last-second field goal. this was also a clear play on michigan state last week for the same reason that playing iowa plus the points was a profitable handicapping spot. and mcsorley is pretty fucking terrible.
this week we saw ohio state open laying 16 and immediately get bet down to 14.5. considering how awful osu was last week and how good sparty was, this is another standard momentum handicap and generally an overreaction from fake-sharps to osu's poor play and a fade of them rather than a confident play on msu. but the line never came down through 14, which would have signaled incredibly sharp money on sparty, confirming the osu fade with msu confidence, and that osu was likely in for another close game. it actually slowly crept back up to the opener and blew right past it, through the 17 and up to 17.5 where it sat for the latter part of the week. this morning we've seen even more osu movement up to a full -18. yikes. buckeyes are likely vomiting at that price.
but the curiosity is in the pudding, or something. sparty, despite catching a big number, is seeing reverse movement. 80% of the bets have been on msu to cover, all week, regardless of the spread. generally, non-professional bettors are betting favorites and overs, but here we see the exact opposite, and we see the line go the other way than we'd expect when 80% of the tickets are written on a certain side. that should set off alarms: an overwhelming majority of bettors (of which an overwhelming majority are non-professional) are on msu today, but the actual line is handily moving against them, and that means respected money is actually on ohio state to indeed play to their potential and brutalize msu.
i'm not sure i'd be quick to go lay 18 points because that's still a big number and there generally isn't much value playing big number favorites against competent teams this deep in the season. but it should tell you that the people putting down the real coin to play this game are confident there IS value at -16.5 & -17, and certainly at the 14.5 where it bottomed early in the week, confirming that osu is still a much, much better unit at pretty much every position and worth a bet. we could delve into stats and quantify these advantages, but that would take us past kickoff and we've somehow already been drinking.
if nothing else, this is a bad spot for MSU after last week, and a great spot for OSU to regress to their mean performance level. no team is as good or as bad as they look in any given week. don't be surprised if osu actually does come out and blow the doors off. we could very well head into the afternoon with gobs of green blood on our hands.
