DXL Frisco Bowl
Tags: Sports, Sports Betting

Welcome to the inaugural Frisco Bowl. The Miami Beach Bowl has moved this year to Frisco (Dallas) Texas. And in the very first addition the Frisco Bowl gets a quasi-home team. The combatants in this bowl are the SMU Mustangs and the La Tech Bulldogs. SMU is based in Dallas and it’s about a 30 minute drive from campus to Toyota Stadium in Frisco.

The line for this game opened SMU -5 with a total of 70. There has not been a lot of movement here as the line; it ticked down to 4.5 over the weekend and dropped further, to 4, on Tuesday night. 4 is a pretty key number so, it should take quite a bit of pressure to move it further. The total is widely available at 71 right now.

These teams are former WAC rivals, and La Tech has owned the “rivalry”, winning three and losing one. The one loss was a tight 3 point affair, the three wins for La Tech were all pretty serious smackdowns. The results probably aren’t that relevant considering they all took place prior to 2005. In fact, this year there is not a lot to separate these teams, including distance. Time to dive right into the stats:

This breakdown is an attempt to predict how many points each team will score and how many points each team will give up by trying to normalize the vastly different schedules each team plays. This is done by averaging out what their opponents score and give up and seeing how much La Tech and SMU outperform or underperform those averages. It appears La Tech can be expected to score and allow pretty much what they are expected to, 1.6 points either way. SMU has far more variance. Scoring 8 points more than they should be expected to but, also giving up 5 points more than they should be expected to. This produces an expected line of SMU -3.5, showing slight value on La Tech.

The other way these previews have tried to produce an expected spread is through YPP. This metric usually leans heavily to the dog and that needs to be taken into account when comparing these.

This shows that these two teams have exactly the same ratio, just at different levels. They both allow more yards per play than they are producing. When teams are this close together, the value shows on the underdog. Other than Akron on Tuesday night (man, was that bad), all the dogs in this bowl season that have shown at least 3.5 points of value in this metric have covered the spread (and won outright).

Furthering the idea that these two teams are pretty closely matched is their 3rd down and red zone numbers.

They are almost exactly the same on 3rd down’s, whether on offense or defense. One spot of possible advantage is La Tech being more successful at halting scoring drives in the red zone than SMU. Much like the YPP advantage, red zone defense can be a pretty big indicator of who is going to win. As pointed out in the Akron and FAU preview, and just mentioned above, teams with at least 3.5 points of value based on YPP are 5–1 so far in bowl games. When it comes to red zone defense teams with a double digit advantage are 4–0 this bowl season (Army/Navy, Troy/N.Texas, WKU/GeoSt, Marshall/CSU). La Tech’s advantage is almost 9 points.

Something that contradicts the red zone defense advantage is the sack rate and tackle for loss rate of SMU. The advantages for SMU are pretty significant. They are going to get into the backfield of La Tech at least a few times for sure.

A good take away from this graph though is the Points allowed per drive. These two teams are giving up over two points per drive. That is not good. And something else that points to these two teams not being good at keeping points off the board is the explosiveness metric.

Not only do these two teams give up over two points per drive on average… they have good offense explosiveness and terrible defense coverage of explosiveness. There could be some huge plays in this game.

Now that stats are out of the way, time to dive into some motivation angles. La Tech had to win out to even qualify for a bowl. They have to be pumped to be in a bowl, even if its their fourth one in a row. While their strength of schedule does not rank high, they played some tough teams relatively speaking. Their non-con schedule contained two SEC teams (and they played competitvely), while their conference schedule contained all the tough match-ups CUSA could offer — WKU, North Texas, FAU, and a surprising UAB team. And while this may be almost a home game for SMU, La Tech is only 4 hours away. There will be plenty of Bulldogs in attendance to be sure. As for SMU, this is their first bowl since 2012 so, we’re popping the cherry here for every guy on this team. Usually one would think teams want to travel to a unique destination for a bowl game but, Lane Kiffin and FAU may have put that theory to bed on Tuesday night. SMU also comes in with a new coach. New coaches usually don’t coach a bowl game right after being hired but, its seems like Sonny Dykes wants this one (he used to coach at La Tech!). SMU also has some wide receivers that you may have heard of. They should both want to put on a show for the plethora of NFL scouts who should be in attendance.

This match-up is really going to be a contrast of offense; La Tech is going to run the ball like crazy and SMU is going to air it out. There is ample opportunity for big plays and both teams have defenses that allow chain moving drives. As they say at the ball park, Let’s play two!

La Tech +4

LaTech/SMU o71

Good Luck