Las Vegas Bowl
Tags: Sports, Sports Betting

Las Vegas Bowl

The third bowl of opening day is the Las Vegas Bowl featuring Boise State vs Oregon and containing a whole whack of college football history.

PAC-12 (or Pac -10 for you old-timers) and Mountain West teams have a long history of playing inter-conference games and bowls and the Pac -12 has eaten in those match-ups. With one exception. And that exception is Boise State. The Bronco’s have long been the darling of the Group of 5 conferences, creating huge upsets and coming oh-so-close to creating true chaos in the old BCS system. Boise previously played in this Las Vegas bowl three straight times from 2010–2012 and beat a PAC -12 team each time straight up.

These two teams also have some very specific and personal history thanks to a pair of college football’s better season kickoff games and LeGarrett Blount, the author of one of college footballs most infamous incidents. Boise won both of those games by the way; adding to their chaos-inducing mystique.

The lines for this bowl opened Oregon -5 with a total of 59.5 (most widely available openers). The spread has since moved to Oregon -7.5, with some -7’s popping back up on Wednesday. The total has held steady at 59.5.

These previews have thus far been fairly stat-heavy (Navy/Army, N.Texas/Troy, WKU/GeoSt) but, this is one bowl where the stats can be thrown out the window and driven over by an 18 wheeler.

Here they are in case anyone is keeping track of these:

As mentioned in previous bowl previews (and probably in every bowl preview ever written) motivation and circumstance can be every bit as important as the statistics put up during the season. In this case it’s all about motivation and injury recovery. These numbers don’t mean much because of two things; One, Oregon has a sophomore quarterback who is really good, and he missed a large portion of the season. Maybe Justin Herbert is not NFL good but, he’s really good for the collegiate level. With Herbert in the line-up Oregon went 6–1 and scored 77, 42,49,35 (loss), 45, 48, and 69 points. With Herbert on the sideline Oregon went 1–4 and scored 10,7,14,41 (win), and 3. It’s so different that it’s hard to lend any weight to the stats. As one can see from the charts above, taken at face value the stats point to a Boise outright win — it looks like Boise should be favored based on expected points; it looks like Boise has a significant Yards Per Play advantage; Boise has a better stop rate and allows less points per drive on defense. But, factor in Herbert’s absence and those stats might be very different.

Two, Oregon has experienced one of the most high profile and strange coaching changes of the early off-season. Willie Taggart was a pretty special hire from USF and in his first year, as just outlined, Oregon went 7–5 and really, with a healthy star qb, they went 6–1. A star qb who is only a sophomore and who is due back next season. Oregon is a fairly respected Power 5 school, so one would think Taggart was set-up nicely to go on a bit of a run starting in 2018. Instead, he has moved on after one year, back to the state of Florida. Mario Cristobal, Oregon’s O-line coach and Offensive Co-ordinator has been named his replacement. It’s always tricky to tell how these kinds of things are going to play out but, you can say this for Cristobal, he has been pretty successful everywhere he’s been in college football. He was an assistant coach under Greg Schiano at Rutgers, where Rutgers achieved the kind of success Rutgers is not used to. Cristobal was then the head coach at FIU and turned that sputtering program into a Sun Belt champion and coached them to two bowl games — upsetting Toledo and losing a close one to Marshall a year later. He was unceremoniously fired after one bad year and then picked up by Nick Saban to help out at Alabama. Cristobal was head recruiter and o-line coach at Alabama and was once again lauded for his work there. He left Alabama to join Oregon this year, with Taggart, to be the o-line and assistant coach. This seems like a great fit, if a steep step up in class. Hopefully Cristobal’s tenure at Alabama will serve him well with this Power 5 school. All that is to say, it’s hard to judge whether the kids will be bitter Taggart left or excited to show Cristobal what they can do.

If Herbert stays healthy and plays like he did in the last two games of the year (blowouts over Arizona and Oregon St) and Cristobal proves he’s ready for this bowl game than this should be no contest. But, coaching changes just make it so hard to tell, especially one this weird. The advice here is wait to play in-game and hope Boise scores first. Get Oregon at a cheaper number after seeing if Herbert and the boys want to play for Cristobal.

No official play pre-game,

Good Luck