North Carolina -5 1.1% FREE PLAY
North Carolina has the better special teams, and TO margin, and better coach. Temple’s Rod Carey is 0-6 in bowl games and 5 of those losses have been by 21+ points. North Carolina’s Mack Brown is 13-8, and has gotten this team to buy in, and getting extra practices for his young team should really matter catapulting them into next season with a bowl win.
North Carolina’s defense is the weak link, but I think they have the potential to dominate. Nobody held Clemson to less points this season, and Temple’s offense can make mistakes, and they rank 98th in YPP offense. North CArolina has been banged up at times this season comes into this game completely healthy.
North Carolina’s offense behind QB Sam Howell up against Temple’s top 25 defense is the story for this game, but digging deeper and I heavily favor North Carolina here. First of all North Carolina has played 5 games against top 25 defenses, and in those 5 games they have out performed what that team gave up on the season by 8.4 points per game. They scored more points than anyone on Clemson, and were +10 against Virginia Tech’s defense, not counting OT. This would put them around 32 points for this game. However, Temple, faced 4 top 50 offenses, and allowed 39.25 points per game in those games, which was +16 points per game higher than their season average of 23.5 points. I expect UNC to actually score 35+ points here. Temple’s bigger weakness is against passing offenses, and UNC’s strength is the passing game. They gave up 28, 45, and 63 points to the 3 top 50 passing offenses, and the 28 cold easily have been more as Memphis had 4 turnovers in that game. Also, UNC faced an average 42nd ranked YPP defense compare that with the top 4 that Temple has faced who had an average opponent defense 65.7.
