Week 1 of the 2025 college football season officially kicks off on Thursday night.
The action begins at 5:30 p.m. ET on ESPN when South Florida hosts No. 25 Boise State. The Broncos are coming off a College Football Playoff appearance in 2024 and will be playing their first game without Heisman runner-up Ashton Jeanty.
After Boise State-USF, 16 other games involving FBS squads are on tap throughout the rest of the evening.
That provides plenty of opportunities on the DFS market to get ahead before the weekend even arrives.
Here’s our top DFS pick for Thursday’s action.
Nebraska vs. Cincinnati DFS prediction
Below is our top DFS pick for the slate of Week 1 games on Thursday, Aug. 28. This pick can be found on Underdog Fantasy. If you’re new to Underdog, grab Saturday Down South‘s exclusive Underdog Fantasy promo code that will help you earn up to $1,000 in bonus cash when you sign up!
Nebraska QB Dylan Raiola higher than 247.5 passing yards
Heading into his sophomore season, Raiola is working with a new offensive coordinator. Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule brought in Dana Holgorsen first as an offensive consultant in 2024 and then elevated him to offensive coordinator for the final 4 weeks of the season. Raiola’s best game of his true freshman campaign — 293 yards while completing 74% of his throws — came with Holgorsen calling plays.
This offseason, Holgorson has said he wants to make life easier for his quarterback, who did an awful lot of dumping it off short last season. There were only 12 power-conference passers (min. 100 dropbacks) with a higher rate of throws behind the line of scrimmage than Raiola. And only 15 passers from that same group had a shorter average depth of target.
In Week 1, Nebraska travels to Arrowhead Stadium for a de facto home game against Cincinnati. Baby Mahomes will be looking to show off his arm in the house that Regular-sized Mahomes dominates on Sundays. And he gets to face a defense that was one of the worst against the pass last year. Four different passers threw for at least 250 yards on the Bearcats’ defense. Cincinnati gave up an average of 7.7 yards per pass attempt and ranked 95th in the country in EPA per dropback allowed. In a showcase game, I’m banking on Nebraska looking to show off its revamped passing attack a little bit.
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.
