UTEP Miners at Oklahoma Odds, Picks, Analysis for Week 1

Let the Brent Venables era begin at Oklahoma! After the shocking departure of Lincoln Riley to USC, the Oklahoma Sooners football program has a new look. Venables, one of the most respected defensive coordinators in the country, left Clemson for the Oklahoma head coaching position. Riley took a lot of players to USC with him, and many others entered the transfer portal so that things will look quite different in Norman this season. Let’s preview the upcoming UTEP at the Oklahoma game, and we’ll give you our NCAA Football Betting prediction for the game.

Week 1 Betting Odds: UTEP Miners vs Oklahoma Sooners | 2022 College Football Betting Analysis

Oklahoma Sooners

Now that Caleb Williams is at USC and Spencer Rattler is at South Carolina, the Oklahoma Sooners will have a new quarterback leading the way. Venables raided the transfer portal, and former Central Florida quarterback Dillon Gabriel will now lead the Sooner offense. He’ll have plenty of good-skill position players at his disposal, including receiver Marvin Mims.

The defensive line will be one of the strongest parts of the Sooner’s defense. Venables has always relied on having a very strong line to disrupt the offense. The transfer portal has been good to the defensive side of the ball as well, so we look forward to seeing something that we haven’t seen much in the past few years at Oklahoma, the defense making some stops.

UTEP Miners

The Miners do have one advantage over the Sooners; they did play a game last week, so that could be beneficial for them. However, they lost to North Texas by the score of 31-13, so things didn’t get off on the right foot for UTEP. Now they have a trip to Norman to take on Oklahoma; as the old saying goes, “when it rains it pours.”

UTEP quarterback Gavin Hardison threw the ball 48 times last week for nearly 300 yards, so we anticipate seeing a lot of passes from the Miners. Granted, they were in catch-up mode for most of the game, so they had no choice but to throw the ball. We’ll see if they try to slow things down and grind out the clock against Oklahoma or if they’ll continue their aerial attack on the Sooners. Regardless of what the offense does, we don’t think that the UTEP defense will be able to slow the Sooner’s offense down.

Betting Numbers

Oklahoma, one of the top-ranked teams in the country, opened up as a 31.5-point favorite in this one. With UTEP coming off of a big loss to North Texas, we expected a large spread, and that’s what we got. The betting numbers for UTEP are a little contrasting. While they’re 0-6 against the spread in their last six games against Big 12 teams, they’re 7-3 against the spread in their last ten games.

The Sooners are 4-0 against the spread in their last four games in Norman, but they’re just 1-4 against the spread in their last five September contests.

Even though the numbers may cause bettors to think about their selections, we’re going with Oklahoma in this one. Even though the Sooners will have a lot of new players out there, and things could get a little messy at times, they’re just too talented for UTEP. We see Oklahoma blowing UTEP out, all while covering the spread. Boomer Sooner!

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