When the New Mexico Lobos face the Montana State Bobcats in a Week 0 game on Saturday, it won’t be the most exciting matchup on paper, but it carries some intriguing history.
The No. 4 Bobcats will be road favorites over the lowly Lobos, which doesn’t seem like an especially crazy sentence on the surface until we remember the level at which each of those teams compete.
Montana State is the fourth-ranked FCS team in the country, playing at New Mexico, a Mountain West team in the FBS. While the closing betting line isn’t settled, the Bobcats are currently 10-point favorites over the Lobos, a double-digit FCS-over-FBS line.
How rare is that, and will the Bobcats make history?
FCS Montana State a Double-Digit Favorite Over FBS New Mexico
There’s a distinct line between the FBS and FCS in college football. It’s why so many teams often struggle to make the transition up to the FBS level.
Football is not like basketball or baseball, where a hot shooting night or star pitcher can flip the script. Pulling off upsets is hard, and recruiting an entire team to be better than a team at a higher level is difficult. It’s why there’s a discernible difference between Group of Five and Power Four teams and between FCS and FBS teams — even bad ones.
But as crazy as it seems, an FCS team being favored on the road against an FBS squad is not without precedent. In fact, it’s somewhat common.
Last season, there were four FCS-over-FBS “upsets.” To the sportsbooks, though, only one was a true upset. Fordham was a 23.5-point underdog to FBS Buffalo but won 40-37.
The other three had lines that closed within a touchdown. In fact, FCS Idaho was a 4.5-point favorite over Nevada, then blew out the Wolf Pack, 33-6. Those two teams compete in the same conferences as the Bobcats and Lobos, respectively, so maybe it isn’t so uncommon.
Since 2005 (the beginning of BetLab’s database), I’ve found 21 instances of FCS teams being favored over FBS teams — about one per season. The recent data mirrors this, as there’s been one FCS road favorite in each of the last two years.
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The data isn’t good for New Mexico, as the FCS team won outright 17 times.
But it gets worse for the Lobos. If Montana State closes as a double-digit favorite, it will be the fourth time that an FCS team has been a double-digit favorite in that span. The other three double-digit home underdogs all lost by an average margin of 12.3 points.
Other Trends To Watch
Of the 21 times an FCS team has been favored over a home FBS team, five have occurred in the season opener. In three of those instances, the FCS team won, covering in two of them.
Even more intriguing is the rivalry brewing between the Mountain West and the Big Sky, the latter of which has turned into a dominant FCS conference.
Since 2018, the Big Sky has 11 FCS-over-FBS upsets, including three over the Pac-12 and eight over the Mountain West. Of seven Mountain West-Big Sky showdowns in 2023, the Big Sky won one outright and lost two by one score.
Ranked Big Sky teams are 5-1 outright against the Mountain West since 2021, but Montana State had the one loss, a 19-16 nail-biter to Wyoming in Laramie.
The game itself could disappoint, but when Montana State and New Mexico face off in Albuquerque, there’s history on the line, and we could quickly earn the first FCS-over-FBS win of the season.
Just don’t call it an upset.
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