Big 12 Championship Total Prediction
The Oklahoma Sooners need to beat the Texas Longhorns to have an opportunity to play in the college football playoffs this season. Will Saturday’s Big 12 Championship tilt between the conference rivals turn into yet another high-scoring OU game?
Game Snapshot
311 Texas Longhorns vs. 312 Oklahoma Sooners
12:00 p.m. ET, Saturday, December 1, 2018
AT&T Stadium, Arlington, Texas
Public Betting Trends
According to oddsmakers from online sports book BetNow.eu, the Sooners are 8-point favorites to beat the Longhorns. The total, meanwhile, sits at 78 points. As of this writing, 53% of the public betting tickets wagered on this matchup are on the Longhorns.
Texas Longhorns
Texas has brought on former Kansas HC David Beaty to serve as a consultant for this week’s Big 12 title game against Oklahoma. Texas head coach Tom Herman is old friends with Beaty going back to the 2008 season at Rice under David Bailiff, when Herman was the OC and Beaty coached wide receivers. This one-week arrangement could conceivably turn into a longer-term gig for Beaty. One of Beaty’s great calling cards as a coach is the ability to recruit in the Dallas Metroxplex, where he was once a high school coach. Beaty was terminated by Kansas earlier this month after serving as head coach for four years. He was allowed to coach out the season. In the finale on Saturday, Beaty’s last game at KU, Herman’s Longhorns beat the Jayhawks 24-17 in Lawrence.
Oklahoma Sooners
Oklahoma redshirt junior QB Kyler Murray confirmed that he will give up football to focus on baseball after the season. “I feel like I could play in the NFL but as far giving (football) up, that’s the plan,” he said. Murray was a top-10 pick of the Oakland A’s in the MLB Draft over the summer. The plan is to leave Oklahoma, forgoing his final season of eligibility, to report to spring training in March and become a full-time baseball player. Sad news for football fans, but this was more or less a foregone conclusion once the A’s turned in a high-Round 1 card with his name on it. We’ll have a minimum two more chances to see Murray on the gridiron, starting with the Big 12 title game against Texas on Saturday.
Betting Trends
Texas
The under is 47-23 in the Longhorns’ last 70 games overall and 42-17 in their last 59 conference games.
Oklahoma
The over is 36-15-1 in the Sooners’ last 52 conference games and 5-0 in their last five games versus an opponent with a winning record.
Prediction
If you’re playing the total in any OU game, the only play is the over. The Sooners are averaging 50.3 points per game and allowing 32.8 per contest. They surrendered 48 points to Texas in the “Red River Rivalry” earlier this season, 40 points to a bad Kansas offense in mid-November and 56 points a week ago to West Virginia. Thanks to Murray, the Sooners can’t be stopped. Thanks to their horrendous defense, Murray also need to score on damn-near every possession given the opponent. Oklahoma is the perfect team to plug in the over every week and watch the scoreboard light up.
Big 12 Championship Game Prediction: Texas/Oklahoma over 78