We’re back!
On Saturday, college football teams will kick off against one another. Players will hit. Dumb plays will flood social media timelines. Refs will make people mad. And the mad dash to the College Football Playoff will formally commence
The return of football also brings about the return of our early-week betting card. Here’s what I’m paying attention to in Week 0.
- 2024 regular season: 72-60-1
- 2024 postseason: 12-9
(All odds via BetMGM unless otherwise noted.)
Week 0 schedule, odds
At SDS, we’ve got you covered all season long with live, up-to-date college football odds. You can find point spreads, game totals, and money line odds for each of the 5 Week 0 games below.
No. 22 Iowa State vs. No. 17 Kansas State
We’ve got an interesting battle taking place between these 2 Big 12 contenders in Week 0. At FanDuel, 61% of the bets on the point spread have been placed on Iowa State to cover the 3.5 points. Two-thirds of the handle has been on Iowa State. At BetMGM, the exact opposite is happening. Kansas State is taking 67% of the spread bets. (Both of those numbers might look different when you read this. They were taken at the time of publication.) I think that points to the uncertain nature of the Big 12 this season. There isn’t a clear-cut elite team, rather a bunch of really good teams. The odds of an unbeaten champ emerging from this conference schedule are pretty slim. And until we get a few data points, all these teams are mysteries to some extent.
In this matchup, K-State is less of one than Iowa State. The Wildcats are near the top of the country in returning production — 14th, according to Bill Connelly. The Cyclones have to replace quite a bit on the heels of a program-defining 11-win season. Two integral pass-catchers are gone from the offense. And the defense has to replace its top 3 linemen along with 4 of its top 6 defensive backs from a group that, last season, was merely good.
Iowa State was 49th in the country in opponent-adjusted EPA per play allowed, according to Game on Paper. They stuffed a bunch of runs but offset that strength by giving up a ton of explosives. Only 13 FBS teams gave up a higher explosive run rate to opposing offenses than Iowa State’s 16.4%.
When you already weren’t great at containing run plays and you have to replace the entire front line, you have the recipe for a potential problem. And Kansas State has the potential to exacerbate that problem right away.
Tackling in early-season games is always iffy. K-State has 2 playmakers on offense who are slippery to tackle even when a defense is running at full strength.
Quarterback Avery Johnson had 31 explosive runs last season and forced 22 missed tackles. Several folks in Manhattan expected Johnson to explode in his first season as a full-time starter, and though that didn’t quite happen, he was still effective. And he should be better in 2025 because of all that experience last fall.
Additionally, the departure of DJ Giddens opens up more backfield snaps for Dylan Edwards, one of the shiftiest, quickest backs Iowa State will see all season. Edwards averaged 7.4 yards per carry last year and scored twice as a receiver. He only carried the football 74 times and forced 20 missed tackles.
Johnson has some options in the pass game who have proven themselves to be big-play threats. Jayce Brown averaged almost 18 yards a catch last season. New Mexico transfer Caleb Medford averaged 19 per reception. If the rebuilt line — 3 starters lost, 4 transfers brought in — meets the standard in Manhattan, this could be a super snappy offense.
Jayden Higgins and Jaylin Noel combined for 167 catches and 2,377 yards. No other Cyclone had more than 26 receptions. No other Cyclone had more than 296 yards receiving. Running back Carson Hansen was the only other Cyclone who found the end zone multiple times out of the pass game.
Last season, the Cyclones were a metronome on offense, averaging 5.9 yards per play, which was smack dab in the middle of the FBS, while limiting the negative plays. But they lived in the extremes. They were awful on early downs, which led to the fourth-most third-down attempts of any FBS team. But they ranked in the 81st percentile in third-down success rate. Noel and Higgins combined to bring in 35 of the 54 Iowa State pass plays that gained at least 20 yards. They combined for 27 contested catches, per PFF.
I think East Carolina transfer Chase Sowell has a chance to pop this season, but in the early go of things, Iowa State’s offense might struggle while everything acclimates.
When Iowa State experienced its first breakthrough under Matt Campbell, it won 9 games in 2020 and almost went perfect in league play. Four wins came by 7 points or less, though, and the Cyclones dipped to 7-6 the following season. They won an opener against Northern Iowa 16-10, but went 1-5 in one-score games the rest of the way.
Last year, the Cyclones went 5-1 in one-score games.
If this game is close — as is Vegas’s expectation — it’s fair to wonder if the bill starts to come due for last year’s close-game prowess. Kansas State should be able to hit enough explosives to play on the front foot. I wonder if Iowa State can find the same kinds of plays.
Last week, I targeted the point total in a piece on early bets to make in Week 0 and Week 1. Now, I’m looking to the spread. Bill Connelly’s SP+ would favor the Wildcats by 4.7 points on a neutral field. I’m playing K-State up to as high as -5.5.
Bet Kansas State -3.5 (-102 via FanDuel)
Fresno State at Kansas
This feels like a game that could be extremely sloppy and even more choppy as 2 teams try to sort through an awful lot of newness. Kansas has 2 new coordinators, only 3 returning starters on offense, and only 5 returning defenders who saw at least 200 snaps last season. Matt Entz gives Fresno State a new head coach and a new staff. And Entz has next to no clue what he has with him. The starting quarterback is a transfer. The top 3 offensive linemen are gone. The top 3 wideouts are gone. The top running back is gone. Eleven of the top 16 defenders are gone.
Kansas has Jalon Daniels, a quarterback with 6,751 career passing yards, 1,401 career rushing yards, and 64 career touchdowns. But Daniels threw 12 picks and completed just 57% of his throws last season.
Fresno State has EJ Warner, son of Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner, who started 31 games at Temple and Rice over the last 3 seasons. But Warner has thrown 37 career interceptions and now plays for a coach who has historically built his teams to be physical, run-and-defend units.
Last season, both the Kansas defense and the Fresno offense were putrid. The Kansas offense was excellent when it held onto the ball, and the Fresno defense was superb at forcing opposing offenses to churn out possessions.
In a Week 0 game, it’ll either all be clicking, or none of it will. I’m banking on the latter.
Bet the point total under 50.5 points (-110 via BetMGM)
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Sam Houston at Western Kentucky
Two new offenses and a couple of big-time playmakers provide an opportunity for this early-season C-USA clash to be a points bonanza. Sam Houston won 10 games last season while Western Kentucky won 8. They combined to go 11-3 against the rest of the C-USA despite offenses that just didn’t provide much.
WKU has a new defensive coordinator and a play-caller who wants to fly up and down the field on offense. Head coach Tyson Helton imported the Abilene Christian offensive engine, bringing coordinator Rick Bowie and quarterback Maverick McIvor. At Abilene last season, McIvor threw for 3,828 yards and was the fifth-highest-graded FCS passer in the country. He had 20 big-time throws and an average depth of 9.3 yards per target.
McIvor will have a really productive slot receiver to throw to and a dynamite outside option in Western Illinois transfer Matthew Henry. The gap between the FBS and the FCS isn’t what it used to be, and it’s not like Henry will be facing SEC-level athletes at WKU. He was a contested catch machine last year for the Leathernecks despite standing just 5-11. He’s sure-handed, bringing in 62 of his 96 targets for 1,140 yards (18.4 per) and 6 scores.
On the other side, Sam Houston brought Phil Longo aboard this offseason after a failed run at Wisconsin. Longo tried to modernize the Badger offense, molding the unit from a ground-and-pound attack into an up-tempo air raid unit. That experiment didn’t work, but Longo has run high-octane offenses in the past. Whether he’s successful or not with SHSU, we can count on possessions.
Bet the point total over 60.5 points (-115 via BetMGM)
Stanford at Hawaii
Since the start of the 2016 season, Hawaii is 5-10 against the spread in regular-season games against teams from the power conferences.
During that same span, the Rainbow Warriors are 2-3 ATS against power conference teams in Week 0 games. A trip out to the islands sounds daunting in theory, and Arizona left with a 7-point loss as an 11-point favorite in 2019, but the last team that went to Hawaii for a Week 0 game left with a resounding victory.
Vanderbilt made the trip in 2022 and won 63-10 as a 9.5-point favorite.
That was coach Timmy Chang’s first season in charge of the program, and he returns for his fourth season in 2025, looking to finally break through. The Rainbow Warriors went 5-8 in 2023 and then 5-7 last fall. They finished 107th in SP+ last season and will open the new season at 106th. The offense is a major question mark, but there’s reason for hope.
Honolulu native Micah Alejado threw 125 career touchdowns with just 4 interceptions during his prep career at Bishop Gorman. But his size — 5-10, 180 pounds — made it hard to project what he’d be at the FBS level. In his first start last season against New Mexico, he threw for 469 yards, ran for 54 yards, didn’t take a sack, didn’t turn the football over, and scored 5 times.
New Mexico was the worst defense in the FBS last season, according to Game on Paper, but not everyone is throwing up a stat line like that in their debut.
In 2025, Alejado gets the keys to the car. If the Chang-Alejado partnership produces, Hawaii, which enters the new season with quite a bit of lineup continuity, becomes a real player.
Stanford, meanwhile, could be really bad. The program has been bad for several years now, but following an awkward breakup with coach Troy Taylor, this feels like a bottoming-out kind of season. The best players left The Farm and it’s just hard to get excited about what interim coach Frank Reich has to work with.
If this line closes where it is now, Hawaii will be a favorite over a power conference opponent for the first time since 2019. That was against Oregon State, a game in which the Rainbow Warriors won by 3. Recent history says to fade Hawaii against P4 teams, but this should be Chang’s best team of his tenure and Stanford could be the worst power team to visit the islands in a long time.
Bet Hawaii -1.5 (-122 via FanDuel)
Derek Peterson does a bit of everything, not unlike Taysom Hill. He has covered Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Pac-12, and now delivers CFB-wide content.
