SEC Football: Buy or Sell Nick Chubb as Heisman Candidate
Nick Chubb is one of 5 SEC football players to make the early betting odds list for Heisman Trophy; we discuss whether you should buy or sell.
5 SEC football players made Bovada’s list of players they were willing to put odds on to win the Heisman Trophy. Unsurprisingly, Deshaun Watson leads that group and is closely followed by Christian McCaffrey and Leonard Fournette.
Related: 5 SEC Football Players Make Heisman Betting Odds List
If you continue scrolling down the list, you see 4 more SEC football players make the list. We’ll start from the bottom and work our way back to Fournette. We’ve already covered Tennessee’s Joshua Dobbs and Alabama’s Calvin Ridley, who both have+1600 odds. Next up is Nick Chubb with +1200 odds.
Buy:
Georgia’s offense has featured top running backs the last few years who have had unfortunate luck with injuries. Nick Chubb was in the thick of the Heisman race in 2015 before he was injured and missed the remainder of the season.
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Chubb began 2015 with 5 straight games of 120 yards or more and scored in each of those games but one. Even more impressive is that Chubb never had more than 15 carries in any of those games and went for 146 yards against Alabama’s front 7. On the season Chubb had 92 carries for 747 yards and had only a few elite SEC football teams remaining on his schedule. It isn’t out of the realm of reason to think that Chubb could have gone for 2,000 yards in 2015.
New coach Kirby Smart is no stranger to SEC football. While he is a defensive coach, he has been an understudy of Saban for several years. I fully anticipate that Smart will run a pro-style offense that will heavily feature the run game. Expect Chubb to get a ton of carries in 2016.
Sell:
Being an elite running back in SEC football isn’t easy. It is even more difficult when you are coming off an injury that cost Chubb as much time as it did. There’s a good chance that Chubb starts 2016 on a snap count, limiting his potential to pad his stats.
Chubb also has to compete with the running back many consider not only to be the best in SEC football but in college football period. Leonard Fournette may or may not be better than Chubb but that is the general consensus heading into 2016. Perception is tough to battle.
It’s tough to make an arugment against Chubb, who averaged 7.1 yards a carry when he was rushed into duty after Todd Gurley’s injury in 2014.
More sec: Can Leonard Fournette Win the Heisman?
Final Verdict:
If I could have the guarantee that Chubb would be healthy throughout 2016. I’m leaning buy based on his past numbers and the potential to be a workhorse back in the mold of Derrick Henry in 2015. I can’t sell his stock, but the risk of him being injured leaves me no choice but to leave it alone.
*All stats taken from espn.com*