Pick Em' Corner: The Professor's Week 1 Smart Money Picks (Thursday Only Edition)

These are, The Professor’s Smart Money Picks (Thursday Only Edition), brought to you by Tuttle’s Eat Bowl Play. Bet Smart®

WASHINGTON STATE -8 Rutgers
This game, set for a 9 pm Central kickoff, will end at about 3 am (good luck at work tomorrow, degenerate gamblers), thanks to the fact that both defenses will feature a total of 1 healthy defensive back, while both offenses like to air it out. Expect Points-A-Plenty. In fact, this is the inaugural Professor’s Points-A-Plenty Game of the Week, brought to you by Breezy Point Resort. Each week, The Professor will pick a game that is sure to feature a multitude of scoring, for all of you out there that are weary of the B1G’s “three yards and a cloud of dust” and prefer your football games to look like basketball games on the scoreboard. Expect a lot of Oregon and Baylor games in this category. Back to this game, I don’t usually buy into the whole time difference excuse for teams traveling from one coast to the other, but I’ll use it here because going from New Jersey to Pullman will take a toll on a team. Finally, The Professor is on the record as despising the continued creep of East Coast Bias to the Midwest’s premier athletic conference. I was OK with Penn State coming to the B1G. They Are Penn State, after all (or at least they used to be). But R U READY and Fear the Turtle? Yawn. Wazzu 56, Buttgers 45.

MINNESOTA -24.5 Eastern Illinois
The Professor feels it. Do you feel it? That strange sensation in your juice belly. It’s not indigestion. It’s not a tapeworm. It’s not that Taco Bell breakfast burrito you had this morning. No, that feeling is momentum. It’s not something we often feel here in Gold Country. Sure, our hockey teams know what it’s like. But momentum for Gopher football? That’s a strange concept indeed. But it’s true. The Gophers are riding a wave of momentum into the 2014 season, thanks to an 8-win 2013 season that featured a team that actually looked like it belonged in the B1G. With a coaching staff that actually knows what he’s doing, a stout defense, a strong running game and some depth at key positions, Minnesota is on the cusp of sustained respectability, a concept we haven’t seen since the halcyon days of Glen Mason’s 2002-05 teams. Sure, there are question marks (QB play, offensive playmakers, depth at LB), but for the first time in a while, Gopher football is trending upward. And an upwardly-mobile B1G team is certainly 24.5 points better than an FCS team with a new coach, a new QB and a defensive coordinator that was a grad assistant last year. Gophers 44, Eastern Illinois 10.