Florida football: Gators open as underdogs on the road vs Kentucky

Florida football will fly out to Lexington this week as they face their first SEC road test of the year against the Kentucky Wildcats.

Kentucky is 4-0 and has been a tough obstacle for the Gators in recent history after being an automatic win for over three decades.

Billy Napier and the Gators are going out there in hopes of improving to 4-1 and stringing some more wins together.

The oddsmakers aren’t so sure about that, however, as Florida opened up as road favorites early in the week.

Florida football: The trends don’t help

Florida is currently a +3 underdog against the Wildcats.

On the season the Gators are 1-3 against the spread, covering against Tennessee but unable to cover at home as favorites against McNeese State and Charlotte.

Kentucky is 3-1 against the number including a big win last week at Vanderbilt where they blew the Commodores out.

Add that to the fact that this is a road game with a noon kickoff, and you start to see why the Gators aren’t viewed very favorably.

On the other side, an interesting trend that may help the Gators’ case is that while Kentucky is currently taking a majority of the tickets (60%), the number dropped from +3.5 to +3, implying that there’s a large proportion of money coming in for the Gators to cover on the road.

Throughout the course of the week, I wouldn’t expect this number to move too much. Based on where money comes in you could see it drop to +2.5 or go back out to +3.5, but it won’t vary past that.

With the Gators being ranked No. 20 in the AP poll visiting the unranked Wildcats, it’s clear that Florida is still fighting for some respect on the national level.

They have to prove that they can go win on the road without 90,000 fans behind them before they get respect from both AP voters and the oddsmakers.

Saturday is a chance for them to do just that.