After burning a lot of money in non-conference play the past few years, the ACC is on a pointspread roll.  Maryland’s win over Nevada has the conference sitting fat from a pointspread perspective, with a 6-0 mark to the number.

The straight up record is only 3-3, with Miami, North Carolina, and NC State logging narrow covers in outright losses while Wake Forest, Florida State, and Maryland won their games outright.   But 6-0 to the spread is 6-0 to the spread.

The ACC battles the SEC in a couple of games on New Year’s Eve, as Vanderbilt takes on Boston College in the afternoon while Georgia Tech meets LSU at night. Those clubs will be the first two SEC teams in action this bowl season.

Eager to draw customers from casinos in surrounding states, Delaware may legalize sports betting early in the year.   Along with Nevada, Oregon, and Montana, Delaware is one of four states exempted from a 1993 federal law that bans sports betting.

But sports bettors in the Mid-Atlantic shouldn’t get too excited.  What’s being proposed is merely parlay betting, and you can bet that two-teamers at 13-5 won’t be on the menu.   Instead, there will be some sort of heavily regulated parlay card offering. In Nevada, parlay card bettors usually lose about 30% of each dollar they put through the window, and that’s with a few casinos offering reasonably good odds in order to attract customers in a competitive environment.

The Delaware parlays are likely to be saddled with enormous takeouts, like 3-team football parlays at 5-1 odds.  Such offerings have drawn little attention in Oregon and Ontario, and will do nothing to meet the stated goal of attracting gamblers from casinos in Atlantic City and elsewhere in the Mid Atlantic.

I hope I’m surprised, and that 6.5-1 three-teamers and 11-1 four-teamers with potentially stale pointspreads will be available.  But don’t count on any such value being part of the Delaware program.  Instead, there will be bad odds, creating a takeout of 40% or more, and hence, a failure.

How does the Syracuse University coaching search influence the Saints vs. Bears Thursday night football game?   A road team having to prepare for a Thursday night game is a tall order.   They need to work almost non-stop from the moment their game the previous Sunday ends.  But after their win over Atlanta, Saints offensive coordinator Doug Marrone flew to Syracuse to interview for the Orangemen coaching vacancy.  He flew back immediately afterward.  Presumably, he worked on the plane.

Word in Syracuse is that Marrone will be named head coach in the morning.  A former Syracuse player, Marrone has told people in the past that it is his dream job?  Think he might be a tad distracted?

This information on it’s own isn’t necessarily worth a play on the Bears, or on the under.  But the potential distraction and workflow interruption on a very short week for the Saints is certainly worth considering as you analyze tonight’s game.

Arizona State’s 34-9 win over UCLA last week was downright bizarre.  The Sun Devils did not score an offensive touchdown, with the points coming on two field goals and four defensive touchdowns.  Only 122 yards of offense was generated by ASU, and their longest drive was a mere 26 yards.

So Arizona State may have the phoniest three-game conference winning streak in college football history, as the UCLA win followed up beatdowns of dreadful Washington and horrific Washington State by a combined 70-19.

Then this week, QB Rudy Carpenter exhibited his senior leadership by getting kicked out of a high school girls basketball game for verbally abusing an official from the stands.

But while it has been a while since it was profitable to knee jerk to underdogs in rivalry games, certain rivalry games continue to see significant road and underdog patterns.  The battle for the Territorial Cup is one such series.  The past 16 Arizona/Arizona State meetings have seen underdogs go 12-4 to the pointspread, with the road teams enjoying an equal 12-4 mark to the number.   And to top it all off, Arizona is 3-8 as a Pac Ten favorite under Mike Stoops.

I’d love to fade Arizona State this week.  But the past history of these teams and the inability of the Wildcats to stretch out to leads in games they should control makes it very difficult to lay double digits with Arizona.

Looking to play home dogs isn’t the worst method of attacking the NFL.  But this season, a year in which the road teams have performed quite well, home dogs have been a pointspread disaster.  Home underdogs are now 19-35-1 (35%) against the number.

Some of the best home dogs historically have been some of the worst teams.  But that is not the case this year.  NFL teams with 3 wins or fewer are 8-22 to the pointspread, making up nearly the entirety of net home dog losers.  Nobody has a winning home underdog pointspread record among the Bengals (2-2), Raiders (1-4), Chiefs (2-3), Lions (0-6), Rams (2-5), or Seahawks (1-2).

Holding your nose to play ugly home dogs is often a winning strategy in the NFL.  But this year it just plain stinks.