The 2023 college football season kicks off with seven juicy matchups on Saturday. We tap into several markets for our college football best bets for Week 0 based on the best NCAAF odds.
The Week 0 slate begins overseas in Dublin, Ireland, as the No. 13 Notre Dame Fighting Irish face the Navy Midshipmen in one of college football's oldest rivalries. Later in the day, the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, Caleb Williams, leads the other AP top 25 team, the No. 6 USC Trojans, into battle against the San Jose State Spartans.
In accompaniment to our college football upset picks and parlay picks, here are our best college football best bets (odds via our best college football betting sites; pick confidence based on a 1-to-5-star scale).
College football best bets: Week 0
- Jayden Thomas (Notre Dame) anytime touchdown scorer vs. Navy (+120 via FanDuel) ????
- Ohio Over 23.5 team total points vs. San Diego State (-115 via DraftKings) ????
- Hawai'i +17.5 vs. Vanderbilt (-108 via DraftKings) ????
- USC -6.5 first quarter spread vs. San Jose State (-196 via FanDuel) ?????
Week 0 college football schedule and odds
(odds via DraftKings)
- Navy vs. Notre Dame (-20.5)
- UTEP (-1) vs. Jacksonville State
- Ohio vs. San Diego State (-2.5)
- Massachusetts vs. New Mexico State (-6.5)
- Hawai'i vs. Vanderbilt (-17.5)
- San Jose State vs. USC (-30.5)
- Florida International vs. Louisiana Tech (-11)
College football predictions for Week 0
Arguably, no team upgraded more at the quarterback position from last season than Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish only got one 300-yard performance from Drew Pyne in his 11 games of action, while Wake Forest transfer Sam Hartman was one of seven quarterbacks to throw for at least 3,500 yards and 35 touchdowns last season.
Jayden Thomas ranked third on the team with 25 receptions last year and seemed to have a good rapport with Hartman in the Blue-Gold Spring Game, catching four passes for 71 yards and a touchdown. Thomas has the fourth-highest odds of any Notre Dame player to score a touchdown at DraftKings but is getting overlooked at FanDuel (he is sixth on FanDuel's odds list), which provides better value for this wager.
At both shops, Thomas is behind fellow wide receiver Chris Tyree, who will take time to get adjusted to being a slot receiver after playing running back his fir st three years. And while the running back duties will fall squarely on Audric Estime, as evidenced by his steep -285 to score a touchdown, Navy's stingy run defense (it has finished with a top-10 run defense in two of the last four seasons) held Notre Dame to 1.9 yards per carry on 34 attempts last year. That suggests the Fighting Irish will look to attack the weaker Midshipmen secondary while showing off their shiny new toy in Hartman in the process.
The San Diego State Aztecs ended last season playing some of their best football defensively, as they allowed 14 or fewer points in five of their final seven regular-season games. However, a defense that finished 12th in total yards allowed also lost a big part of its production in the front seven, as just one of its seven players from its defensive line and linebacker corps that played 400-plus snaps last year returns.
San Diego State will rely heavily on three junior college transfers to fill that void, which is dangerous when facing an Ohio offense with a veteran offensive line (returns 75% of its starts) and a dynamic quarterback in Kurtis Rourke, who finished in the top 10 nationally in completion percentage, passing yards per game, efficiency, and total offense, despite missing the last few weeks after tearing his ACL.
DraftKings is the go-to shop for this wager, as FanDuel and bet365 charge -120 and -125 odds to back the team total Over 23.5.
The Vanderbilt Commodores are currently getting 60% of the point spread handle, but that number figures to go up before kickoff, as they manhandled the Hawai'i Rainbow Warriors 63-10 last year. But we prefer to be on the contrarian side of this wager with the underdogs, as two of Vanderbilt's most important offensive players from a year ago, running back Ray Davis and quarterback Mike Wright, have transferred.
Rainbow Warriors quarterback Brayden Schager had five straight 200-plus-yard games to finish the season last year and looks to take the next step in his second year in head coach Timmy Chang's system. And Hawai'i returns more starters on defense (nine) than Vanderbilt does (eight) and arguably did much better in the transfer portal, with three defensive linemen from Power 5 schools to bolster the front seven.
All sportsbooks are in unison with the +17.5 point spread, but DraftKings stands out slightly because it is the only shop charging less than the -110 juice to back the underdogs.
Anytime a team returns its head coach and starting quarterback combination, it will have an advantage early in the season. But when that head coach and quarterback set school records for passing yards and attempts, which resulted in the signal caller winning the Heisman Trophy, that offense that ranked third in the country in points per game should not miss a beat.
USC outscored its four non-conference opponents, including Notre Dame and Tulane (in the Cotton Bowl), by a combined score of 38-7 in the first quarter last season. And the Trojans' much-maligned defense allowed more than one-third of its points (35.7%) in the fourth quarter alone, so it should have time to gel against a San Jose State offense that ranks 94th in Offensive SP+.
Given that we would make DraftKings' offer of USC -8 at +120 odds a confident three-star play, needing the Trojans only to be leading by a touchdown at the end of the first quarter is a no-brainer five-star play and worth every bit of the steep -196 price at FanDuel. For comparison, bet365 has USC at -500 odds to win the race to 10 points, so we do not see USC starting slowly enough to not be up by 7+ after the first 15 minutes.
Colle ge football best bets made 8/25/2023 at 7:12 a.m. ET.
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