College Football Betting Preview: Not Really A Big Game For Gators

Florida Gator fans have defended their early season cupcake schedule by saying that a potential blockbuster game awaited in week three of the college football season. The hated Tennessee Volunteers were on the schedule that week and would be coming to Gainesville ready for a fight.

The only problem is that no matter how much the analysts on television and radio try to hype this as a big game for Florida, odds makers have offered a contrary opinion. The Gators are favored by four touchdowns.

Twenty-eight points, that is the difference that sports books see between the Gators and the Volunteers, yet Gators fans continue to view Saturday as a big game. Perhaps that is because coming off a two game stretch when they played Troy and Charleston Southern, any game against a nationally known team is a big game.

The truth is that the Gators should win this game in a landslide, and there is not much after this game that will show whether or not Florida is one of the best teams of all-time, which certainly was one of the goals when Tim Tebow returned for his senior season.

The SEC is down this year. Georgia has already lost, and LSU and Mississippi appear to be over-hyped. That leaves only Alabama as a serious threat to the Gators perfect season, and even that game will only happen if the Crimson Tide does not slip up during the regular season.

What the Gators needed was a USC, or a Ohio State, or a Virginia Tech. A game that would define their season, one that would make fans believe they are not being mislead by the current system in college football. Unfortunately, the fans are stuck with determining how good this Florida team is based on Division II opponents and another opponent that has not been relevant in years.

The networks will continue to stuff Florida and Tennessee in your face, and they will insist that you believe it is a big game, but just remember, the odds makers are usually right. If that holds true, then this is not a big game, it is simply a match up of one great team and one poor one.

How great these Gators can be the college football world may never know, and that is the crime of scheduling cupcake games instead of games where there is an element of danger. Florida may win their national championship, but they have done themselves a disservice when it comes to college football history.

College football is about finding greatness through the course of a twelve or thirteen game season, and with that small a sample size, there is no room for eight games that do not matter. Hopefully in the future the NCAA will see the error of their ways and will require talented teams to play against their own skill level.

Until then, we will be stuck with the Gators and the Volunteers, a mismatch, but one in which the NCAA and college football fans must hype as "important." Unfortunately, it may not show the true greatness of the team up in Gainesville. When the all-time great teams are debated in the future, these Gators may be left out of the discussion, and they will have nobody to blame but themselves.

September 18, 2009
Posted By Vincent Tapoglia III
Staff Editor, CasinoGamblingWeb.com
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