The Missouri Tigers hosting Tennessee football headlines our Volunteers, Southeastern Conference and top 25 picks for the 2019 season.
While Tennessee football enjoyed its bye week, we had a roller coaster of a weekend with our predictions. Now, as the Vols return, they have two weeks to try to reach bowl eligibility, and we have two weeks to try to turn a profit for the season.
Remember, a profit on gambling picks is breaking 52 percent. Even if we’re ahead of the curve on predictions straight-up, that 52 percent number is where we want to get to on the spread and the over/under for the year.
With the Vols out, we just barely hit that for Saturday. Like Tennessee football, we still have a good bit of work to do, though. Here’s a recap on how we performed in all nine games we predicted during Week 12.
Record for Week 12 predictions straight-up: 8-1
Gambling Record: 9-8-1
Against the spread: 5-3-1
On the Over/Under: 4-5
Yes, we just went above .500. A couple of things killed us. The Ole Miss Rebels had some late scores after the game hit the over, which gave use the tie, against the LSU Tigers. Meanwhile, the Baylor Bears not scoring one point in the second half is why their loss to the Oklahoma Sooners hit the under.
And we missed the spread by one point and the over/under by two points in the Minnesota Golden Gophers against the Iowa Hawkeyes. If Minnesota just hits a field goal instead of going for it on one fourth down inside the goal line, we hit both of those. As it is, those things took us from 13-5 to 9-8-1. Here’s how we stand on the year.
Overall record for predictions straight-up: 90-23
Gambling Record: 103-99-4
Against the spread: 56-44-3
On the Over/Under: 47-55-1
As you can see, we remain just over 50 percent. But we haven’t hit that 52 percent mark just yet. And we’ve got two more weekends in the regular season to do it, starting with this one, in which a lot of non-conference games against lower-level schools are happening.
Three SEC teams have a bye this week. There are three games featuring two SEC teams playing each other. That leaves five others, and all of them involve an SEC team against an FCS team. Then we only have one non-SEC game featuring two top 25 teams.
Since we don’t pick games between FCS and FBS teams, That makes for nine games overall to predict but only four with gambling consequences. So we’re limited on how much of a surge we can make.
Nonetheless, we’ll do our best. As usual, we’ll pick the games in the order they are scheduled while closing with Tennessee football. And the picks are based on lines from Action Network. Here are our Week 13 Vols, SEC and top 25 predictions.