Our injuries is hurting us. And seeing Syracuse all access has been a little intimidating. I see why it jumped by 3 point from July to now.

Who? Is? Injured?

To be perfectly honest +17.5 is extremely generous considering we lost like 90% of our offensive production from last year and a ton on defense. There are so many unknowns with this team. We will definitely learn a lot about what kind of team we have in week 1.

Also, injuries are a part of the game. I don't think a Bradley Weaver injury (however serious it may be) is going to swing the odds LOL

The main reason for substantial lines changes, especially in the case of a game like this when it's a season-opener and the opening line was posted in the summer, is very simple - MONEY. Remember, sports books want balance in their books. They want money played on BOTH Syracuse and Ohio. Money being played on Syracuse has driven the line to where it now stands. Further, opening lined games in college football have never been tougher to gauge than now with all the portal movement in the offseason. It's always been sort of a guessing game to predict how a team will look from season to season. But with so much fluidity in rosters from year to year now, it's even more difficult. There's a lot of knowledgeable people on this board who have watched and followed this program for years. We all kind of know what to expect this season. But we'll all find out around 2-4 games into the season if we were accurate with our predictions, or way off. The same can be said for a game like Ohio at Syracuse. Right now, it's somewhat of a guessing game. But if these two teams played a month into the season with 4 games each under their belts, it would be much, much easier to access what's an accurate line for a game than right now or even two months ago when the line came out.

Ditto, OhioBobcat, in terms of you describing how Vegas tries to even up the betting action on both sides by manipulating the Point Spread. Still, the Bookmakers in Vegas have gotten incredibly skilled at what they do to the point that even smaller and less significant games such as the ones involving the Bobcats are accurately scouted to a fault. If anybody has any insight about how good this Ohio University team is, it would be Vegas. That said though, I still think that they must be pulling their hair out in response to the unpredictable craziness brought on by the NIL system of today. On a personal level, I got out of sports betting years ago, because it was becoming less and less possible to shop for a favorable points spread in any sport, let alone College Football. After all, not only have the bookmakers in Vegas become extremely savvy, but so have all of the online betters of today. I have to think that even the talent stacked Power 5 programs are probably still considered a Work in Progress until we see whether all of this concentrated talent that each of them have can gel as a team. This certainly makes the upcoming season potentially fun for us fans, but extremely nerve racking for anyone who is trying to make money gambling on all of this chaos.