NCAA Football Preview: Savannah State at Miami-FL

This may be the biggest mismatch of the 2013 college football season both in terms of the intrinsic talent disparity between the two teams and the pointspread involved. The long suffering Savannah State Tigers are 1-2 on the season with a pair of blowout losses against superior opponents and will make perhaps their toughest trip of the season as they head to Miami to take on the Hurricanes. The ‘canes have looked good so far in 2013 with a win over Florida Atlantic in their opener followed by a victory over in-state rival Florida in their previous game.

Savannah State is actually coming off a rare win heading into this game–they beat Division 2 Fort Valley State last weekend–but against their better opponents this year they’ve been downright pitiful. They opened their season with a brutal 77-9 loss against FCS powerhouse Georgia State. In all fairness, the option based Georgia State attack is made to order for wearing down inferior opponents but the Tigers came back with another dismal performance the following week dropping a 66-3 verdict to Troy. The simple math would suggest that if a good FCS team and a decent FBS team can beat Savannah State by 60+ an even higher level team like Miami-FL should also be able to do so and easily cover the whopping -60 point spread in the process?

Not so fast–of course Miami has the talent to beat Savannah State by whatever score they choose. The Tigers have been pitiful on both offense and defense–they’ve averaged 13 PPG games on offense and are allowing nearly 600 yards per game on defense. If the Hurricanes wanted to ‘drop the hammer’ they could win this game by 100. But what does third year coach Al Golden have to prove by doing that? He’s riding high at the moment following the win over Florida and has a couple of tricky games on deck at South Florida and at home against Georgia Tech. We look for the Hurricanes to ‘go vanilla’ and make this a glorified scrimmage in which they make no particular effort to embarass their overmatched foe. Miami will move the ball at will but we expect them to content themselves with a ‘gentlemanly’ 45 to 48 point win against the hapless Tigers, giving Savannah State a rare pointspread victory.

BET SAVANNAH STATE +60 OVER MIAMI-FL