College Football Week 2 Upset Picks: USC a Road Dog?

• We have three Week 2 upset picks for you, including USC as an underdog
• So far we’re up on this season! Let’s see how long that lasts
• This is the year Kentucky beats Florida

Picking upsets last week was a lot of fun, and watching Hawaii beat up on Navy was doubly so. To review Week 1:

NCAA College Football Week 1 Results

That leaves us up 2.0 units through Week 1. Let’s keep it going!

USC at Stanford

I know, I know, I picked against Stanford last week and got embarrassed. (It helps if you read this next part in Stephen A Smith’s voice) Howeva–

These are tight, physical games, most often decided by who can win the physical battle up front. Normally you’d pick Stanford to win that matchup every time, because the Cardinal is famed for their play in the trenches. Normally.

For their part, USC is doing just fine getting JT Daniels up to speed. With all the weapons at his disposal, Clay Helton can make life easy for Daniels, and if USC can run the ball like they have in the past they have a great shot at an upset.

Kentucky at Florida

This is the year the streak ends.

I’m not really basing this on anything other than Kentucky being really experienced on defense and Florida being institutionally incapable of scoring any points at all. Florida still has tons of questions to answer in the pass game, and while Kentucky isn’t the most prolific team in football they are just the kind of stout and experienced team that presents too many challenges.

Let’s review how close this game came to an upset last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q9auAzP29c

That’s not a comfortable margin of victory. I imagine that Kentucky will have taught its defensive backs the fine art of “not running off the field on third and 1.” Florida’s streak could very well be broken this week, and I’d love to have that ticket.

Michigan State at Arizona State

The weird thing is that S&P+ actually projects Arizona State to win this game outright. S&P+ is, of course blind to things like Herm Edwards being 140 years old, but it’s still worth something here.

Things I like about this pick: home dogs have always been good to me, especially in the early weeks, especially for out-of-conference games. Arizona specifically has proved a pretty treacherous place for road favorites, as fans of Washington, Oregon, or just about any PAC-12 team with national title aspirations will recall.

Also: ASU played real well last week. Michigan State got off to a disappointing start, beating Utah State 38-31, and travelling all the way down to Tempe might be a big ask.