NCAAF - SEC Bets - Week 1

8/25/2024

The 2024 SEC football season is finally here, as two games featuring SEC schools kick off tonight. And along with it, we're thrilled to launch the 5th Annual Bucket Squad Sports Reports SEC Betting Challenge. Like we've done for each of the last four seasons, our five college football experts will compete to see who can most accurately predict the results for every SEC game of the year. And this time, we also have one extra special announcement that will be discussed soon.

If you haven't been following along in past seasons, our five experts will predict who we think will win and cover in every game involving an SEC school, as well as the over/under on the point total for those games. Here's our BSSR SEC Betting Challenge Hall of Champions, featuring the overall winners each season:

As I alluded to above, we have an extra special twist to this season's challenge that will allow some of our fans and followers to get it on the action and attempt to etch their names in BSSR history. Along with our five experts' picks each week, we will also have one guest picker who will be predicting the same slate of games as us for that week. The guest picker will be different each week, for a total of 14 guest pickers throughout the season. There will be a separate leaderboard posted throughout the season to determine which guest picker performed the best by overall win percentage, and he or she will also be inducted into the BSSR Hall of Champions as a first time winner of the BSSR SEC Betting Guest Picker Challenge.

I'll give a brief bio of our guest each week, and first up, we have Stephen Fox. Stephen is a man of many talents. He is most famously known for his professional basketball career, as he played overseas for many years in various European countries before a brutal knee injury forced him into an early retirement from the sport. He now spends his days dealing Android products around the globe, golfing, and gambling on sports, which makes him the perfect candidate to get our guest pickers started this year.

Week 1 of the SEC football season, like usual, features a multitude of SEC teams taking on weak non-Power 5 opponents. And as a result, only five of the 16 games we're picking this week has a spread within 20 points. The most highly anticipated of those are #19 Miami at Florida, #7 Notre Dame at #20 Texas A&M, and #23 USC and #13 LSU in Vegas on Sunday.

Florida is hoping to get off to a good start this year, because they can't really afford not to. They have the most brutal seven game stretch to end their season that I've ever seen, and there's a real danger that they could drop all of those games. So this week is a very important matchup for Billy Napier as one of their in-state, out of conference rivals rolls into the Swamp on Saturday afternoon.

Mike Elko is also looking to start hot as head coach of Texas A&M, as he has an opportunity for a top 10 win in his first game with the Aggies. It obviously won't be easy, but Texas A&M fans are hoping Elko can get more out of the talent at A&M than Jimbo Fisher was able to accomplish last season. Hopes are high for Notre Dame with Elko's QB last season, Riley Leonard, transferring in to grab the starting quarterback role. But if there's anyone who can gameplan for Leonard, it's Mike Elko.

Brian Kelly's LSU Tigers will travel to Las Vegas to face one of the newest members of the Big 10, the USC Trojans on Sunday night. (I'd like to quickly point out that the Big 10 now has a total of 18 teams.) After getting the pleasure of watching Jayden Daniels put up a Heisman performance for the Tigers last season, it will be interesting to see how the offense performs after losing almost their entire skill group from a year ago.

The last game I wanted to mention before we get into our picks is #14 Clemson at #1 Georgia. Georgia is rolling in to Atlanta as the top ranked team in the country and several years of evidence that they should be one of, if not the best team in college football again this year, but I'll be curious to see how Carson Beck fares without his favorite target, Brock Bowers, in the lineup. Despite a 13.5-point spread, this will probably be one of the more highly anticipated matchups of the week.

Now, the moment everyone has been waiting for. As a formality, I'll post our clean slated leaderboards before our picks for each game of the week, which will include our guest's picks. Thank you in advance to the experts for competing another season, and to all of our guest pickers for taking the time to join in on the fun. May the best gambler win in 2024.