Dave Price
1 Unit on Houston Cougars -30
Rice has managed back-to-back wins but I'm not buying. The Owls are awful after losing basically their entire offense from last year's team. Houston is high-powered and it will be very hungry to deliver its biggest blowout of the season on senior day against a rival that beat them last season. Consider that plays against road underdogs off an extremely close win by 3 points or less over a conference rival against an opponent off a blowout win by 21 points or more over a conference rival are 40-13 ATS the last 17 seasons. Houston rolls at home.
Jeff Alexander
1 Unit on USC -13
UCLA has won 3 in a row, but I think they hit a brick wall against same city rival USC tonight. The Trojans have had two weeks to prepare since their embarrassing loss to Stanford and I like Pete Carroll's chances with that kind of time on his hands. Off a bye week, Carroll's club is on a 19-7 ATS run and the home team is on a dominant 19-8 ATS roll in this series. Plus, UCLA is on a 5-17 ATS slide in road games after 3 or more consecutive straight up wins. Lay the points.
Insider Angles
The USC Trojans should be in an ornery mood here, as this is their first game since losing 55-21 to Stanford two weeks ago, and while we expect the offense to take out its frustrations vs. the UCLA Bruins this week, the Cardinal did expose the USC defense, so we are looking for a high-scoring game here.
The Trojans have not lost many games under Pete Carroll, but on the rare occasions that they do, they always bounce back strong. In their last nine losses under Carroll coming into this season, USC averaged 32.4 points per game in their following game.
Looking at their first two losses this season, the Trojans rebounded to score 27 points vs. Washington State and then an atypical 14 points at Arizona State. With this game being at home, we look for a normal bounce-back for them here as we simply do not see USC having back-to-back sub-par performances at home. The real story though has been the performance of the defense lately, allowing 55, 47, 36 and 27 points respectively in four of their last five games.
The UCLA offense can easily take advantage of the sudden struggles of the USC defense, as after a slow start this season, the Bruins offense is averaging 30.0 points and 434.3 yards of total offense over the last three games. Now UCLA may not have quite enough offense to match a solid USC performance for the entire game, but we do expect them to score a minimum of 21 points.
Given that we expect USC to put up at least 28 points here, three touchdowns from the UCLA offense would be enough to push this game Over the total.
PICK: UCLA, USC Over 47.5