The Georgia Bulldogs are -47.5 over Tennessee State on Saturday, the single loudest number of the weekend, and if you know anything about Kirby Smart’s history with numbers this big, you already know why Georgia fans are nervous watching a blowout.
Kirby Smart is 0-15 against the spread for his career when favored by 38 or more.
That’s not a curse. That’s a pattern. Blowing a team out by 40-plus and still finding a way to lose the bet has basically become a Georgia bit, and it might be the most impressive and most cursed stat of Week 1 of the college football season.
Georgia’s -47.5 was the loudest number of the weekend, and it wasn’t especially close to being the only ridiculous one. Texas Longhorns fans got a -29.5 over Texas State (moneyline of -9000, if you wanted to feel something about your parlay). The Alabama Crimson Tide sat at -27.5 against East Carolina. The Michigan Wolverines went off the board at -27.5 over Western Michigan.
Four spreads treating the sport like it’s rigged. Four books that thought they had this weekend of college football week 1 betting 2026 figured out to the half-point.
Here’s the part nobody priced in.
While Vegas was busy being that confident, Tarleton State, an FCS program most of the country couldn’t locate on a map, let alone a depth chart, walked into Bowling Green and beat an FBS team outright, 20-13. Not covered. Won. Tarleton State beat an FBS team outright in Ohio, and none of the models built for Georgia’s game ever saw it coming, because nobody was building a model for this one at all.
https://x.com/ESPNCFB/status/2096317790458142736
Tylan Hines ran for 250 yards, including an 82-yard burst, and Tarleton led 17-0 at halftime before holding on when Bowling Green stalled on 4th-and-1 at the 8-yard line with under two minutes left. I had this queued up as a laugher for the home team. Instead I watched an FBS program get stiff-armed by a school whose mascot I could not draw from memory if you paid me.
This wasn’t even Tarleton’s first rodeo. They beat Army in double overtime last season, went 12-2, won a share of the UAC, made the FCS quarterfinals, and currently sit at No. 5 in the FCS poll.
That’s back-to-back FBS wins in as many seasons — the 16th time an FCS program has done that since 2006. The moneyline here (-142 for Bowling Green, +118 for Tarleton) wasn’t even a gimme going in, which somehow makes the whole thing scarier. The market saw this one coming closer than it ever saw Georgia’s.
Now the complicating part, because I promised myself I wouldn’t spend four paragraphs torching Vegas and call it a column: Alabama actually covered its -27.5, winning by 38. The machine isn’t broken everywhere. It’s broken specifically in the building where Kirby Smart still can’t cover as a mega-favorite, which is a specific and hilarious place for a program that recruits like Georgia does to keep losing money.
Georgia was still on the field as of this writing, Texas hadn’t finished either, and Michigan hadn’t even kicked off. No verdicts there yet. But the lesson of the day already landed on its own: you can build a spread on every advanced metric college football has to offer, and a team that refuses to read the room will still walk straight through the front door of your spreadsheet.
Check out the rest of our Week 1 betting coverage, because after this slate, every number on the board should come with an asterisk.
Somewhere in Stephenville, Texas, they’re already printing “we don’t need your respect” t-shirts. They earned it.
