Who says Mack Brown doesn’t know what he’s doing..??  He fires his defensive coordinator Manny Diaz and replaces him with retread Greg Robinson, and the Texas defense immediately steps up and performs for their new coach, cutting their rushing yards allowed in half from 550 on the road at BYU to 272 at home vs Ole Miss..!!!  That old weasel’s still got it!!

It’s week 4 and we’re almost there boys and girls…Conference play picks up next week, and the schedule goes full mode the following week to kick off October, my favorite month of handicapping in the season.  This week there are only seven AQ conference games, which thankfully jumps to sixteen matchups next week, before moving to twenty-nine for the first week of October.

Why is October my favorite month of the season to handicap?  Well, besides the fact that I went 15-0 last year during the month, the reasons are simple.  For a statistical handicapper like myself, you can’t make much of the numbers in September.  Sample size is too small, and the level of competition is not comparable to what teams will face the rest of the season.  By the time October rolls around, there are a few games worth of data to look at, and if you dig deep enough you can find some interesting nuggets lying under a rock.

There’s also the case of the “What are we doing here..?” team, which happens when a team that wasn’t expected to be successful, usually one that started the season outside the Top 25, ends up ranked in October, just in time to face its conference opponents who know them all too well, as opposed to the lightweights that they’ve been beating up on in September.  Teams that could fall into this category are Maryland, Minnesota, Arkansas, Texas Tech, and Washington.

Washington RB Bishop Sankey (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

On the flip side are the “Sleeping Giants”, which are those teams that either faced injury early on in the season, a change in personnel from last season, or happened to face a daunting schedule to open the season, and now have a chance to turn around their season.  These are the teams that are getting a TD or more on games in October than their GOY lines or week one lines would have indicated.  TCU, Syracuse, Purdue, Vanderbilt, and Cal could be ones to keep an eye on for ATS success in the month ahead.

Another by-product of October games are their effect on the totals.  As I mentioned in last week’s column, Top 25 teams went 9-5 O/U in week 2.  That record improved to 11-5 O/U last week, bringing the two week record to 20-10 O/U.  That’s an impressive pace, and one that I don’t expect to continue much longer.  And a big part of that reason is the onset of conference play in October.

Teams that have faced each other year over year are better prepared to deal with the advantages on the offensive side of the ball than teams that never face each other.  On top of this, oddsmakers tend to shift lines towards what happened most recently, as this is what is at the forefront of the average gambler’s mind.  So with a rash of “overs” cashing in the month of September in non-conference games, totals will be skewed higher for conference games in October.

Three games into the season and we’re at the unofficial quarter pole, so I figured I would take a look at the “$20 Bill in your Winter Coat Pocket” teams and the “Rocks in your Candy Bag on Halloween” teams that I wrote about before the start of the season.  The three surprise teams (Minnesota, Missouri, and East Carolina) are 4-1, with the Golden Gophers leading the way with a 2-0 ATS record.  The money burner teams (Nebraska, NC State, Iowa State, and honorable mention South Carolina) are 5-3 ATS if you faded them each week, with both the Cornhuskers and Cocky posting 1-2 ATS records.  All together a nifty 9-4 record ATS if you followed blindly.  Now let’s hope those records don’t reverse in October!!

If you’re up so far in September, don’t by shy about booking your profits this weekend.

If you’re down so far in September, don’t worry… plenty of opportunities lie ahead.

T$