College Football Betting: Boston College at Massachusetts

The Battle of the ‘Bay State’ is on deck for Saturday morning though to be honest it’s not much of a battle. UMass football is in the toilet due to a number of factors. They’re still feeling the effects of the transition from FCS to FBS though you think after four seasons they’d have found some traction. The school’s athletic budget is constantly being cut and they’ve had no real ‘home stadium’ for the best several years. They’ve got a nice new facility in Amherst but got suckered in to playing ‘a minimum of four home games’ at the New England Patriots’ home stadium. This means that they’ll have two “real” home games this season against Florida International on 9/17 and against Wagner on 10/29. Perhaps in an effort to shore up the football program’s budget it sure looks like an overly ambitious schedule this season. As a FBS Independent, they’ve got to take games where they can but there’s a number of stops where they look completely outclassed–they’ve already played at Florida and will play at Troy, at South Carolina, at BYU and at Hawaii before the end of the season. All told, it doesn’t look good for UMass to add many victories to the eight they’ve had since the start of the 2012 season.

They’re nominally the home team in this matchup but obviously the venue actually favors Boston College. It’s a shorter trip to the venue for the Eagles and they’ll have a lot more fans on hand. There’s a couple of factors working against BC in this matchup. They’ve had a long return trip from their opening game in Ireland against Georgia Tech. There’s also a more important game on deck next week at Virginia Tech–their only conference game (and only challenging game with Wagner and Buffalo up after that) before they play Clemson on 10/7.

It wasn’t that long ago that the UMass program was showing some promise. They had the new campus venue in the works and they were starting to look competitive on the field–they were for a time a very nice team to play getting points. Not sure why there’s been so little progress since but hard to see them hanging with BC here. The closer than expected result at Gainesville last week might say more about Florida than UMass and is apparently being given too much significance in setting this price.

BET BOSTON COLLEGE -17 OVER MASSACHUSETTS