BUT, if you watched last year’s Clemson opener, good running D’s (e.g., the ‘Noles) = sucktastic football.

Personally, as an economics guy, I love predictive markets and the like, and have always been intrigued by the point spreads and betting lines.

And you are right, given the disparities between how the two teams are ranked in the pre-season, you would think the spread would be a good bit higher. I can think of three reasons that might explain that:

1. Clemson is generally highly-touted in the pre-season, but they have never been able to live up to the hype once those Autumn Saturdays roll around. They’ve never made a BCS game, won the ACC, or appeared in the ACC Championship Game. The betting class feels that Clemson will simply not live up to the expectations as per usual.

2. Saban experienced a surge in his second year at LSU, and with the incoming recruiting class and the lack of losing any truly great players from a year ago, the betting class expects Alabama to have a pretty big surge and be better than everyone expects.

3. The disparities between the two teams results from Clemson being the best ACC team while Alabama is likely only to be the fourth or fifth best SEC team. The betting class thinks that the SEC is stronger relative to the ACC point that a game between a middle-of-the-pack SEC team is going to be very close when playing even the best ACC team at a neutral conference.

And it’s a wager I’d be DELIGHTED to lose.

Now that sounds like a damn good idea.

Me, Todd, and Nico always do the pick’em thread anyway, and we could just all of the readers respond in the comments. Just do it every week and keep track of stuff.

Sounds like a great idea to me. Actually, Todd and I were just talking about which games to pick.