The world is discounting BYU in the run up to the Cougars Armed Forces Bowl tango with the Tulsa on December 30th. Okay, that might be a little hyperbolic. Still, there remains an array of opinons on how this bowl matchup will turn out. The Cougars opened as a 1.5 favorite over the Tulsa Golden Hurricane. That number has fallen to, well, zero as of this morning as the majority of bets taken by Sportsbooks around the country have been in favor of a Tulsa cover. The official spread is now a Pick'em, which is a fancy way of saying 'We have no idea." It isn't just the degenerate gamblers who see Friday's matchup as favoring the Golden Hurricanes. Both the Sporting News and NBC News' College Football Talk picked Tulsa in a close one.
On the other side of the docket, our favorite Lost connosieur Stewart Mandel from Sports Illustrated picks the Cougars to win by 10 points on the strength of their defense. Dennis Dodd, Bruce Feldman, and three of their colleagues think a BYU win is also in order. Two of their compadres, Brett 'The Source' McMurphy and Tom Fornelli see Tulsa scoring its second straight win over BYU in as many chances. CBS SportsLine, who the above-mentioned contingent write for, have a pretty good statistical preview of the game at hand. The folks over at Yahoo! Sports are split on the matchup, with Pat Forde bleeding blue while his counterpart Mike Huguenin sees a Hurricane on the horizon.
As for the pulse of the people? 54% of Yahoo! users believe Tulsa to have the upper hand. The iPhone app Sportacular has 75% of its users picking a BYU victory. (This is not a Scientific Poll, amirite?)
How do y'all think it will play out?