NCAA Football Betting: Colorado State at Alabama
The rebuilding Colorado State Rams face perhaps their toughest challenge of the year as they make the long trip to Tuscaloosa, Alabama to take on the Crimson Tide. The Rams managed to win their first game of the year last week, handling a decent FCS opponent in Cal Poly. Needless to say, they take a huge step up in class here. Alabama is coming off their huge revenge win over Texas A&M and look like they’ll be in the mix for their third straight National Championship under head coach Nick Saban.
Colorado State finished 4-8 in Jim McElwain’s first year as head coach but have found the going tougher so far this season. Simply put, the Rams’ 2012 wins came against the doormats on their schedule-they beat in state rival Colorado (1-11 last year) and also won games against Hawaii (3-9), UNLV (2-11) and New Mexico (4-9). Also worth noting that after their opening win against Colorado last year they were thumped by FCS powerhouse North Dakota State in their next game, losing 22-7 as -8 point home favorites. The problem facing Colorado State this year is that there just aren’t as many doormats on their schedule and the ones that are there have improved since 2012. Rams have lost money as an underdog in the past two seasons going 8-12 ATS, are 4-7 ATS on the road and a pitiful 4-8 ATS in non conference play.
Clearly, Alabama has the ability to ‘name the score’ against Colorado State but there’s several reasons to think that they won’t. First of all, there has to be some letdown coming off that big road win against Texas A&M. The Tide didn’t cover but did earn the SU win after falling behind early and even for a well coached team this looks like a classic ‘flat spot’. More importantly, perhaps, they have a pretty compelling reason to ‘go easy’ on the Rams-Jim McElwain was the Alabama offensive coordinator from 2008 to 2011. Just don’t see much reason for Saban to want his team to ‘put the screws’ to the well liked McElwain who has enough problems trying to get the Colorado State program back to a reasonable competitive level. Tide also have a SEC game against Ole Miss on deck.
BET COLORADO STATE +40 OVER ALABAMA