What is the Penn State-Villanova point spread? That and the total are now out

Penn State football hosts Villanova for the first time since 2021 on Saturday. What’s the point spread before kickoff? Per the usual, sportsbooks like BetMGM waited until as close to kickoff as possible to line the FBS vs. FCS contest. But, the outlet has now posted betting info for the 3:30 p.m. ET kickoff on FS1.

Head coach James Franklin’s team is a 48-point favorite. The over/under betting total is 56.5 points.

The 12th-year leader of the Lions admitted Wednesday that the Wildcats’ defense gave his offense problems when the two sides met five years ago. Penn State did not cover as a 29.5-point favorite back then. It won 38-17. PSU led just 17-3 at halftime. It was 3 of 12 on third down for the game. And, it rushed for less than 100 yards total.

More: Penn State-Villanova Predictions: Can the Wildcats challenge the Nittany Lions like they did in 2021?

“This is different than, like, odd,” Franklin said. “This is three stack. They are constantly moving, spiking, slanting, twisting, and it’s smart, right? Like a lot of times, it’s hard to get defensive linemen. So you can go to this system and then just create chaos and get guys running free. That helps. The other thing it does is, if you don’t approach it the right way, it slows down the offensive line, because they’re worried about all the movement, so then they’re tentative, so now they don’t come off the ball the way you want them to come off the ball. So there’s a method to their madness, and it creates some challenges, but that’s also where we’ve been working odd front all the way from the summer. It’s harder when you don’t see it in practice every single day. That’s the challenge. But we didn’t wait till this week to start working on it. But it is challenging. 

“It’s like facing the wishbone, if you don’t see it all year long. And there’s some differences. There’s ways to get them out of the stack and into an odd front. So a lot of times, people will do that to try to calm it down a little bit, but they do a nice job, and they’ve been running this system for a while and have had success with it. So they’ve stayed with it and promoted from within. But it definitely causes some challenges. It caused us some challenges the last time we played.”