College football Week 1 best bets: How to bet LSU-Clemson

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Every opener comes with a headline and a number, and in Week 1 the number usually gets written to the headline.

Lane Kiffin walks into LSU’s Death Valley on the home sideline for the first time and the total drifts toward a shootout given Kiffin's resume. Ole Miss walks into Nashville with a head coach who came up on the defensive side now running the program that made its name throwing the ball. I understand the instinct, because the theater is real and I will be watching both games, but it is just not what scores points, and in both of these the units on the field are quieter than the names selling the ticket.

If you read Monday's card, you know the shape of the board already: three unders, nothing on the sides that cleared the bar, and none of that has changed.

I like two more totals here, one of which we were snooping into toward the end of the Monday read.

Here are my best bets for Week 1 of the college football season:

Clemson at No. 11 LSU (-10, 50.5)

Saturday night in Baton Rouge, on ABC and Kiffin's first game in Death Valley with the home crowd on his side. I want to give the over its full consideration, because it has one.

Kiffin is one of the best playcallers in the sport, our coaching model credits his arrival with a point and a half on offense, and the roster he inherited returns more offensive production (93rd percentile in our index) than almost anyone in the country, with Sam Leavitt taking the snaps.

When I wrote about this game last week, the total was 51.5, we made it 50.2 and I told you the line was right — which it was. It is not 51.5 anymore, though. The total has come down a full point to 50.5, and our projection has moved with it and then some, because the pieces that were fuzzy a week ago have come into focus, and none of them are pointing towards scoring.

Dabo Swinney named Christopher Vizzina his starting QB this week. Vizzina is a senior who spent three seasons behind Cade Klubnik and arrives at his first career start with 596 passing yards to his name. He opens on the road against an SEC defense after holding off true freshman Tait Reynolds. That is a quarterback room being sorted out in real time, in the loudest stadium it will play in all season, and our model reads it the way you would expect: 19 expected points for Clemson.

The defense on the other sideline is the other half of the argument. We project LSU to allow 14.3 PPG this season, fourth in the country behind only Ohio State, Indiana and Miami. Add a 568-mile trip for Clemson, a night crowd in Baton Rouge that makes every check at the line harder than it looks on tape, and the simple fact that a quarterback in his first start rarely produces the explosive plays a 50.5 total needs, and you get 29-19 LSU.

Then there is the weather, and I am putting it last because I want you to see the game without it first. Baton Rouge is sitting at a 92% chance of rain at kickoff across the four forecast models we pull from, with thunderstorms in the picture, and our weather model takes 1.83 points straight off this total. That gets us to 48.2, and it also means I owe you the honest version: most of this edge is the rain.

The football case is worth about a quarter point on its own, which is nothing, and the reason there is a bet here at all is that the sky over Tiger Stadium is going to open. If the forecast dries out between now and Saturday night, this is a pass, and I would rather tell you which brick is holding the wall up than let you find out on Saturday. We're backing the market steam to be correct in a fun one to start the season.

Bet: Under 50.5 (-104)

No. 24 Louisville vs. No. 9 Ole Miss (-7, 55.5)

On Monday, I called this the number I wanted and could not have, because 55.5 was one book's lookahead total and a price no one else has to honor isn't really a price. BetMGM has it posted at 55.5 now, and I'm not going to pretend I wasn't waiting for it, so let me start with everything the over has going for it, because on paper it is a lot.

Trinidad Chambliss is back for a sixth season (and among the Heisman favorites), Ole Miss returns more offensive production than 84% of the country in our index and brings back a defense that returns even more. Louisville has an Ohio State transfer in Lincoln Kienholz taking the snaps, and this game will feature two top-25 offenses on national television in a dome-less September in Nashville with the temperature near 90. The market looked at all of that and wrote 55.5, and I understand the instinct.

That is the crux of the whole handicap: two offenses run by coaches who did not run them last year. Lane Kiffin is in Baton Rouge and his offensive coordinator went with him, and the Rebels' Pete Golding was promoted from defensive coordinator to run a program whose entire identity was its passing game. Our coaching model marks that change at a point and a half off the Ole Miss offense, the largest negative offensive grade on the entire board, and it is not a knock on Golding so much as an observation about what happens to an elite scheme when the man who called it leaves the building.

Then there is Louisville, which plays at the No. 131 pace out of 138 FBS teams in our model. That is the eighth-slowest team in the country, in a game the market has priced like a track meet, and a team that will not snap the ball quickly is the simplest under there is. Neither of these teams has to travel to get here either, with Louisville 152 miles from Nissan Stadium and Ole Miss right at 200, which fits the spirit of the short trip pattern I have been writing about all week.

We make this game 30-22 Ole Miss, a 52.2 in our score expectations model, better than three points under the number, and the heat is worth about a third of a point back toward the over, which I have already paid for. SP+ has the Rebels 5.4 points better on a neutral field compared to a 7-point line, which is exactly why the total is the play, not the side.

One piece of housekeeping, because it is the same thing I flagged on Monday: This game still is not posted across the industry, and 55.5 is BetMGM's number, not a consensus. Shop it, and if the rest of the market comes in lower than 55.5 by the time you read this, the bet is the number, not the logo.

Bet: Under 55.5 (-110)

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