Oregon State Beavers @ Wisconsin Badgers Free Pick & Preview

Okay, I’m not math major here, but let’s do a little addition and subtraction here and see what we come up with.

Let’s start with Oregon State: The Beavers went into the season without the players that had been responsible for most of their success over the last couple years. Canfield graduated while Jaquizz Rodgers took off for the NFL. We’ll call that -5, at least. Then you have Oregon State starting out their season with a pretty easy game against subdivision school, Sacramento State. Should be a cake walk, I mean the Beave rests in the new and improved Pac 12, right, right right? Well, they lost to Sac-State in overtime, 28-29… Let’s call that -10, just because -100 seems unreasonable. After losing that game to start it off, they have to travel to Wisconsin to play a Badgers team that has scored 48 or more points in 4 of their last 5 games including 51 against UNLV in Week 1. Just for the mental anguish of having to watch film of those games for preparation purposes, we’ll give another -2. That’s -17 on my math scale. Now how about Wisconsin?

The Badgers got a decent transfer from North Carolina State, the Wolfpack’s best player, quarterback Russell Wislon. Now I didn’t think Russell would catch on that quickly, but apparently I was wrong. He was close to perfect in the UNLV romp, completing 10 of 13 for 255 yards and 2 touchdowns not to mention 2 runs for 62 yards and another score. They’ve scored about a billion points over their last 5 games and have lost just one of those contests. They get another home game against a sub par soft team from the Pac 12. Well, I forgot to do the math, but I’m thinking the positives add up to, well, +24.

-17 to +24 – that’s a big difference. If the final point differential adds up to 41, I’m going to claim genius. If it’s that -20, I still push. But I’m looking for MONEY in this one!

Oregon State Beavers @ Wisconsin Badgers (-21)