As I did with my NFL early thoughts piece, I thought I’d give you some of my early thoughts for this week’s college football action as well.

To start, this is going to be a week where we might see a decrease in action from the casual bettor as numerous ranked teams are off this week. The list is quite extensive as all of these teams I’m about to list are undefeated SU this year and taking this week off to recover: Georgia Tech, Oklahoma, Marshall, BYU, Oregon, Arizona, Alabama and Mississippi State.

A lot of those teams have big games on deck, including Oregon and Arizona playing one another, so look for action and the lines to move early and often this time next week.

As far as this week’s games go, there are still a few big games between some very good teams and to no one’s surprise one of those is the Florida State/NC State game. 

Florida State opened up as 23-point favorites but have since been bet down to -19 after they squeaked out an OT win on national television last week. However, unless I find some more conflicting info in the coming days, I don’t agree with this move at all. Barring another stupid decision from Jameis Winston to keep him off the field, I expect the Seminoles to show up in full force this week and put a beating on this Wolfpack team. If this spread continues to drop, don’t be surprised to see me have a write up on the Seminoles later this week.

Other early leans I have this week as lines are starting to shift around are Stanford -7.5, Miami -7, and Oregon State +9

Miami is an interesting one as they are coming off a SU loss and laying a TD against an undefeated Duke team that crushed them 48-30 last year. Obviously the revenge spot is a good one for the Hurricanes and the fact that at first glance this line looks way off tells me to side with the “crazy side.” I’ll definitely be doing more work on this game as the days go on, but that’s something to keep in mind.

Oregon State heads to the Coliseum to take on a rested Trojans team licking their wounds from a loss up at Boston College two weeks ago. This line opened at +11 and has crossed that key number of +10 already, thanks to the favorite in this Pac-12 rivalry being 0-4 ATS the past four meetings.

Stanford is another team coming off a bye week as they go up to Seattle as road chalk against the Washington Huskies. I believe Stanford just has too much physicality in the trenches on both sides of the ball for an opponent like this and with a 7-3 ATS mark in their last 10 against Washington, I like there chances here even as road chalk. The fact that two of those three ATS losses came in the past two meetings – including a 17-13 SU loss the last time they were @ Washington – tells me that there is zero chance the Cardinal take this game lightly. Stanford needs to start racking up wins in Pac-12 play if they want to play for the Conference Championship again since they are already 0-1 SU in the Pac-12 and I believe it starts with a big win this week.