Tennessee vs. Florida College Football Week 4 Picks and Predictions

After nearly beating Alabama, the No. 11 Florida Gators are the wrong NCAAF pick for Saturday’s tilt with the Tennessee Volunteers.

Tennessee Volunteers vs. Florida Gators

Saturday, September 25, 2021 - 07:00 PM EDT at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium

That’s twice now the Florida Gators have almost beaten the best team in college football. The Gators were 14-point home dogs on the NCAAF odds board for last week’s game against the Alabama Crimson Tide; they lost 31-29, an even closer matchup than their 2020 regular-season finale, which saw Florida lose 52-46 as 16.5-point puppies on neutral ground.

Head coach Dan Mullen won’t be happy with those results, but his team is clearly performing at a very high level. So of course we’re going to fade the Gators (2-1 SU, 1-2 ATS) this Saturday when they host the Tennessee Volunteers (also 2-1 SU, 1-2 ATS). The fine folks at Heritage have Florida as 20-point favorites at press time, up from –19.5 at the open, but our consensus reports show 91 percent of early bettors on the Volunteers. They’ve got all the earmarks of an old-school value college football pick. Let’s see if the numbers add up.

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

Keyboard Warriors

First up, we have Jeff Sagarin’s overall Rating projection at The USA Today, which have Florida winning by 13.97 points. That’s a gap of... let me see, carry the one... nearly six points between the computers and the college football odds. Six points~! Either we should be betting a pile of money on Tennessee, or Sagarin went and spilled hot coffee all over his laptop again.

Good thing we have multiple sources at our fingertips. ESPN’s Power Football Index pegs Florida’s chances of victory at 88.5 percent, for a fair moneyline of -770 using your favorite gambling calculator and mine, the SBR Odds Converter. Sure enough, the Volunteers are once again a bargain at (visit our Sportsbook Review), although the potential profit margin doesn’t look quite as encouraging this time.

https://twitter.com/Vol_Football/status/1440003836622553090?s=20

Always... No, Never Forget To Check Your References

Now that we’re heading into Week 4, what the heck, let’s consult the Simple Rating System at Sports Reference and see what they’ve got for this matchup. They have the Gators at plus-19.49 SRS, and Tennessee at plus-11.06; give the home side a generic three points, and you get Florida –11.43 for a quick-and-dirty projection. That seems a bit off, although it’s pretty close to Sagarin’s eigenvector spread of –11.55. Maybe we should leave both those formulae in the oven for another week or two.

Anyway, the numbers appear to support our old-school hypothesis that Tennessee are worth at least a small bet here. You might want to hold off until closer to game time, just in case the Vols get to +21 on the NCAAF lines, but they seem to have found their footing under first-year head coach Josh Heupel. Tennessee check in at No. 28 on the Week 3 S&P rankings; that’s well behind

Florida at No. 8, but again, way too good to be getting 20 points for this contest. Bet accordingly, and may the prolate spheroid be with you.

NFL pick: (visit our Sportsbook Review)

*The pick reflects the line at the moment the writer made the play, the odds at the beginning of this article show the live line movement. Since the lines might vary, don’t forget to refer back to our live odds.