My free play analysis for Week 0 of the College Football Season looks at Nevada and New Mexico State.
Both teams come into the match-ups with new head coaches with Jerry Kill taking over at New Mexico State and Nevada will be coached by Ken Wilson. Kill comes in after finishing out the Gary Patterson era as interim coach at TCU, and Wilson joins from Oregon as Co-DC, although he spent more than 20 years at Nevada earlier in his career.
The Wolfpack will feature a bunch of new players with only 6 returning starters, but they did get quite a few from the transfer portal. NMSU is relatively unproven on offense with only 3 players coming back, but they do have 9 returning starters on defense although that’s not saying much since they were 127 out of 130 teams in total defense in 2021 and they were 112th against the run allowing just under 200 yards per game. The Wolfpack will certainly try and leverage the running game in this one and they do have Oregon transfer Cross Patton (Whose father is Big Boi from OutKast) along with some other solid options at RB. NMSU will struggle a bit on offense as well especially concerning are some major issues on the OL. I do think Jerry Kill slows down the tempo a bit from last year, but this team is going to have to try and keep up as I expect Nevada to run all over them.
Last year Nevada won 55-28, but they called the dogs off in the 4th quarter. They also had 463 passing yards and 6 touchdowns through the air and all that production in the passing game is gone.
Even with all those trends that would lead you toward the under the bottom line for me here is I think this line has swung too much. The over/under opened at 55 and is down to around 50ish depending on the book. These teams only hit under this number 7 times combined last year, and even with all the coaching changes I can’t see the defenses turning in a Big Ten type performance. At some point the fact that NMSU’s talent on defense is so bad will come through and big plays will happen in both the running game and passing game for Nevada. Once that happens the game should speed up for NMSU and even if they dont score it should give Nevada some more chances close to the goal. It’s still football out west that doesn’t feature San Diego State so I like some points later in game here.
I’m predicting a 37-24 final here. Taking Over 50 for 1.5 Units with a Lean toward Nevada -9
