With the USC Trojans and UCLA Bruins, both having issues, who belongs in your college football picks for Saturday’s rivalry game?
Saturday, November 20, 2021 – 4:00 PM EST at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum
The Pac-12 is so bad this year, they broke the internet. Five of their teams were in the AP preseason Top 25, including the No. 15 USC Trojans; the UCLA Bruins would eventually crack the rankings and make it all the way to No. 13. That’s ancient history now. Only two Pac-12 teams remain in the polls heading into Week 12, and neither Los Angeles team is among them.
Take the overall poor performance of this conference, and the chaos surrounding the Trojans, and it’s hard to say which of these teams is the right choice for your college football picks when they meet this Saturday at the Coliseum. The Bruins (6-4 SU and ATS) definitely have the edge as 3-point favorites at Heritage Sports (visit our Heritage Sports Review), but the projections for this contest are all over the map – and that 65.5-point total on the NCAAF odds board at Bovada (visit our Bovada Review) super-tight.
We might have to use some old-school handicapping principles to sort this one out. Jeff Sagarin projects UCLA to win by 2.08 points, but for some reason, ESPN’s Football Power Index has USC (4-5 SU, 3-6 ATS) prevailing 55.6 percent of the time. We’d love to use FiveThirtyEight as a tiebreaker, but neither of these teams was good enough to make it onto their charts this week. We could try the Simple Rating System at Sports Reference, of course.
Maybe their formula will have enough predictive power now that we’re near the end of the regular season; they have the Bruins at plus-5.23 SRS and the Trojans at plus-1.68 SRS, so take that difference, give USC a generic two points for home-field advantage (as per Sagarin), and you get something close to... let’s see, carry the one... UCLA –1.5. Then again, this isn’t a full-on road game for the Bruins, who played at the Coliseum from 1933 to 1981. Hmmmph.
The total is often Plan B for making our NCAAF picks here at the home office – there usually isn’t enough obvious betting value compared to the spread to make it Plan A – but Sagarin has these teams scoring 65.20 points, and Saturday’s weather forecast for L.A. looks too good to provide any angles, so never mind that. Perhaps it’s just as well that we don’t overthink this one.
The Bruins may have fallen out of the rankings, but at least they’ve won three of their last five SU and ATS. More importantly, they still have football savant (well, NCAA football savant) Chip Kelly in charge. The Trojans sent Clay Helton packing on September 13; they’re 3-4 SU and 2-5 ATS under interim coach Donte Williams. This isn’t Senior Week for USC, either – that’s next week against the BYU Cougars. We’ll fade that for a dollar.
NCAAF Pick: UCLA –3 (–108) with Heritage Sports (visit our Heritage Sports Review)
*The line and/or odds on picks in this article might have moved since the content was commissioned. For updated line movements, visit BMR’s free betting odds product.