Point Blank – September 9
Hey Coach, how fast do you wanna go…Alec Asher may not have been very good at all last night…How many times do you get to bet Clayton Kershaw at value…
The first full NCAA/NFL weekend is a quite a time across the betting markets, and if the Carolina/Denver action at the windows is a precursor of what is to come there may be an astonishing marketplace for 2016. That is good for our purposes, so time to buckle in and begin sort through the various edges that will be available. I will open with a take on a rather unique six-pack across the NCAA landscape, games in which a coach might be sacrificing his own team’s scoreboard this week in order to further their development down the road. And later on we can bet some baseball.
Item: Different paces, for different purposes
One of the issues that has been discussed often both as a lead topic and in the follow-up threads is to watch first-year coaches extremely close, whether they be HC, OC or DC, to try to learn patterns as quickly as possible. When something deviates from the past you can often get a major step on the marketplace, which can end up relying on old data that has gone past is expiration date. Several coaches come under that microscope in a major way this week, as do a couple of holdovers, because they have stated a purpose to push the pace and have their team play as fast as possible.
But here is the rub – a half dozen of these coaches are significant underdogs this week, beginning with Dino Babers and his Syracuse team as they take on Louisville tonight, and naturally one of the most dangerous things to do when you are out-manned is to extended the game by adding more plays to it.
Here is the list, which has Babers, Scott Frost (UCF), Bronco Mendenhall and his OC Robert Anae (Virginia) and Just Fuente (Virginia Tech) in major early challenges for their programs, and Philip Montgomery (Tulsa) and Chad Morris (SMU) in their second campaign -
#304 Syracuse vs. Louisville
#313 UCF at Michigan
#333 Tulsa at Ohio State
#361 Virginia at Oregon
#367 Virginia Tech vs. Tennessee
#369 SMU at Baylor
Here is their conundrum – do they coach in order to get the best possible scoreboard result from this week, which would mean slowing things down, or do they work on building their program, which means keeping their foot on the accelerator?
Some of these settings bring a fascination because of the upside. Babers gets a chance to make his style a showcase in front of the national cameras tonight, and can also use the Carrier Dome as part of the showcase – if you are a speed player that wants to compete at a high level, and perhaps move on to the NFL, how about having your home games in a dome, with a fast playing surface?
It has not taken long for the flow of the Orangemen to change. There offense ran 155 plays in a shortened spring game, and while the players and local media got excited, Babers downplayed it - "I thought the tempo of the offense was OK. We'll never be that slow again."
He does acknowledge one of the major challenges in the transition - not just getting players to learn a new playbook, one that most were not recruited for, but also the particulars of why this offense can be a challenge. "Believe it or not, it's the tempo. It's the tempo because when you are putting the plays in the playbook, if a guy can't breathe and can't focus and always has his hands on his legs trying to grab air, he is not going to be able to listen to the coaching points. So it's always the tempo. They have to be able to handle the tempo first, so they can have the air in their lungs to be able to hear exactly what you are telling them, so they can get better from play-to-play."
They obviously will not be ready to play their best yet, and may struggle to assimilate throughout the season. But what would be the better “sell” for Babers tonight, a 45-31 loss or a 24-17 loss? If we could meet him in private and ask the question, he might genuinely prefer the former, in terms of the long-term goals of the program.
The most extreme of these is Frost, who quickly stated that he wanted to make UCF the “The Oregon of the East”, and while that could sound silly for a program coming off of an 0-12 season, and had played slow tempo for a long time under George O’Leary, there is a tremendous amount of upside for the Golden Knights. Let’s let Frost’s own words lay that out - “It's great being in a place where those kids that want to stay close can stay here, not to mention it's a lot easier to get kids to visit our campus unofficially, there's a lot more kids here to choose from.
“One of the things that drew me to the job is I knew I could run a version of our offense that was practically identical to Oregon's because we can recruit that type of player here. I don't think you could run Oregon's offense at Wisconsin; I don't know if you would get enough guys that can run well enough to do it. In Orlando, Florida, there's fast guys in high schools in every direction in close proximity that are already running systems in high school that are similar to this and should want to play in it.”
I made tracking Frost’s first game a part of the Monday column, and while UCF did run 91 plays vs. South Carolina State, it was rather ugly – just 462 yards vs. an out-manned opponent. Playing fast can be a disaster against Michigan in the Big House, the potential for so many quick 3-and-outs serving to gas out the Golden Knights defense. But if Frost thinks long-term, he has a chance to show those potential recruits what his program is going to be about, and note a major motivation on that front – the Big 12 will be watching all season. While UCF may be thought of as a small school in a lesser conference it is actually the highest-enrollment university in the land, and a candidate for Big 12 expansion, that conference getting a footprint into Florida behind an important notion.
Perhaps the biggest conundrum on this list is Fuente. He is the one coach that is more than allowed to save “fast” for later because he is not rebuilding at Virginia Tech, but rather trying to maintain a program that has been successful for a long time. His best chance to win on Saturday, and the Hokies are good enough to win vs. Tennessee in front of what may be 160,000 fans in Bristol, is to slow down, avoid mistakes from young QB Jerod Evans, and let Bud Foster’s defense be the lead unit for the team.
Right now I don’t have a horse in any of those six races, though Virginia Tech will tempt as the number climbs, and Tulsa may well find a way into the pocket – long-term readers know how successful the Golden Hurricane were for our purposes last year, and Montgomery has the talent on offense to put three or four TDs on the board in Columbus, with the back-door likely open as Urban Meyer and the Buckeyes hold something back for that trip to Norman next week. The key is not so much what we can earn from these games, but what we can learn from them, a chance to see some coaching stripes rather quickly.
Item: The Weekend Flow
I will address this both here, and in the first thread comment, since a lot of folks only get a quick grab-and-go of the top section as part of their routine in the 9-to-5 workday.
Weekends will be a work in progress for now, trying to figure out the best way to get through the football cycles. Even without the NFL last weekend is now sitting at 43 pages and over 33,000 views, and I fully understand the frustrations that come with having to navigate through all of that. I had hoped for a better platform in place for this season, but that remains a work in progress.
There was a thought to splitting the weekend in two, with both NCAA & NFL editions, and that may well happen if this proves to be too cumbersome. But even that solution forces folks to go back-and-forth, and while there is still daily MLB going on strong edges brought in by the community could get lost in the shuffle. So it will be one thread throughout the weekend this time, and we will adjust from there based on how the flow goes.
Should the markets create some opportunities for something of an “In the Sights…” level, like those Wisconsin +14’s that floated around last Saturday morning, they will be both posted in the thread, and back into this section as well, for easier long-term reference. I can’t wait to see what the Sunday NLF marketplace looks like, with a couple of games right near a strike point on that board.
About Last Night…
While you were watching Panthers/Broncos you might have only paid cursory attention to the MLB board, which could have led to some shock when you saw the box scores this morning, and noted Alec Asher throwing six shutout innings for the Phillies, allowing only two hits. The same Asher that was 0-6/9.31 in The Show last year, and who lost 80 days of this season in the Minors because of a drug suspension. Before you get impressed, be careful.
Asher had one of those evenings of Baseball Being Baseball, and time will tell if he was a Pinball Wizard, or if the machine itself had a bit of a tilt. He did not record a single strikeout of the 22 batters he faced, and had more fly-ball outs than ground-outs, which is a difficult way for a pitcher to be successful. In fact, his GB% of 20.0 was rather hideous. If you don’t strike out a batter, and 80 percent of the contact is in the air, you have been far more lucky than good – while I don’t like using the other metrics much for single-game purposes, an xFIP of 6.74 does bring an indication of what could have happened, had the geometric distribution been normalized.
Item: The Point Blank Fantasy Challenge is going strong
There has been a terrific response already to our 2016 NFL Fantasy Challenge, and you can enter for free up to kickoff of the first games on Sunday by going here.
The chance to win prizes for free, and hold bragging rights over your peers, is a difficult thing to pass up. As is the rare opportunity to back Clayton Kershaw at value…
In the Sights, MLB…
Ordinarily I am hesitant to back pitchers coming off of the DL, but I believe Kershaw is an exception, the Dodgers being so extra careful with him through the rehab process, and with a 5-game lead in the N.L. West, and no real reason to force him out there before he is ready, I believe what I am hearing from them. I also want to continue an anti-Jose Fernandez ride that has been good for the pocket, so with -130 having become available in the morning trading (I've seen as low as -17 at Pinny) it will be #955 LA Dodgers (7:10 Eastern) in play, this one good up to -145 on my charts.
Note that there have been two aspects in playing against Fernandez, one being his continuing road struggles, but the other the fact that the way his career has evolved has not built him up for the stamina needed across a full season. He only threw 116.1 frames from MLB mounds across 2014-15 combined, but is now up to 160.1, and over his last seven outings has labored to a 1-4/4.54. Fernandez was downright rocked at Cleveland on Saturday, a game that made this spot on the page, and note that in the first pass through the Indians lineup those nine hitters produced four doubles and a home run. Yes, Fernandez continues to be brilliant from this mound, but his PPI has not been lower than 15.9 since July 23, and I color him as being vulnerable, especially as that “Line Utility” factor remains in play – Fernandez is not going to see the 8th inning this season, and in fact has only appeared in the 7th once over this last seven starts, which makes his footprint on games less than the markets factoring.
The team behind Fernandez is a mess, quite a contrast to the Dodgers, who developed a tremendous amount of confidence in going 38-24 after Kershaw went on the DL. The Marlins have lost contact with the Wild Card race in a 2-10 slide, the offense dreadful and the bullpen fading, which makes this more than a fair price point to get involved.
In the Sights, NFL…
I will get in play today with what will be a recurring theme in the early part of the season – with Tyler Eifert and Marvin jones missing on the field, and Hue Jackson from the sidelines, the magical season put together by Andy Dalton in 2015 brings the strong prospect of regression, and the path for Week #1 is
#459 Cincinnati Team Total Under (1:00 Eastern), with 21.5 available in the Sunday trading (make it good to -130).
Here is the arc of the Dalton’s career, measured by Passer Rating –
2011 80.4
2012 87.4
2013 88.8
2014 83.5
2015 106.2
That puts perspective on how much of a leap 2015 was, and while Dalton indeed made strides, much of that was about the supporting cast around him, including 117 catches for 1,431 yards and 17 TDs from Jones/Eifert (13 of those TDs were from Eifert, who will be missed badly in the red zone until he returns). In terms of replacing Jones note that Dalton did not complete a pass to Brandon LaFell in the pre-season, and is still learning the ways of rookie WR Tyler Boyd, while TE’s Tyler Kroft and C. J. Uzomah are each in their second season, and unproven. Lacking chemistry will be a problem on the road against one of the NFL’s best defenses, especially with Darrelle Reavis being one of the few CBs that can go one-on-one with A. J. Green, which frees up those stunts and blitzes that are a big part of the Todd Bowles Schemes. And while opening without Sheldon Richardson would be a major blow for most teams, the Jets have plenty of depth up front.
I don’t expect the Bengals to be efficient on offense today, nor bring much of a pace as the new faces get worked in.
In the Sights, Sunday MLB…
It is almost shocking that the Yankees of all teams could put on such a surge and there only be crickets, not just from the Sports Mediaverse, but also the Betting Markets. Could it be that the folks that wrote them off simply don’t want to admit their mistake and alter their notions? Now a team that has gone 6-0 on this high-pressure home-stand, moving to within a single game of the Wild Card, is being sold short once again, and it will be #966 NY Yankees (1:05 Eastern) in play this afternoon, with as low as -123 out there in the early trading (make this good to -135).
This is not just a play-on situation, but the fact that the Rays have been abysmal on the road all season, a 24-42 that includes a 4-11 slide since August 1. Matt Andriese does not have the form to turn that, looking weary in his last two outings, when the Orioles and Red Sox tagged him for 14 runs over just nine innings. It shows what happens when a division opponent gets added looks vs. his mediocre stuff, and that is a particular problem today – he was hit very hard from this mound back on August 13, four different Yankees hitting HRs in an easy NYY win.
Luis Cessa has worked to a 2-0/3.04 in four outings since being moved into the starting rotation, only walking five batters across those 23.1 frames. With Dellin Betances fresh from a Saturday day off the later stages are in good hands as well, with the oddsmakers selling this setting short of where it should be.
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