As Stu alluded to elsewhere, yesterday got a little messy for our bets, and we ended up only placing a small (relatively speaking) hedge against the Washington State future. That’s the bulk of what we’ll be talking about today, but a few other quick hits first:
Xavier and Texas A&M Impress
We’ll do a Buzz Williams experiment tomorrow, but the man keeps doing what he does, and across the bracket, I don’t know what Jonas Hayes’s status is at Xavier as far as a role on the Sean Miller staff, but the guy can clearly coach. This isn’t to take anything away from the players for either team, or from Dominick Welch, who single-handedly kept St. Bonaventure in it last night. Quenton Jackson was outstanding, everyone on Texas A&M’s roster seems bought-in, Xavier got production from up and down the roster which is exactly what you expect out of this team when it’s grooving…just solid basketball, and I’m obviously exposed to a lot of NIT Kool-Aid, but it’s worth checking KenPom now and then and seeing that Texas A&M would be about even money playing against Providence, and would be favored over Wisconsin, and would be within a point of Alabama if you don’t want me to list teams KenPom was notoriously contrarian on this year. Basically, by the time you get to the NIT Championship, usually at least one team is playing legitimately solid Division I basketball, and they care, and there’s something cool about the situation which always gets me.
The New NFL Overtime Rules Could Help the Packers
It’s a small thing, and who knows if the Packers will be in a position to capitalize on it (the rule is only for the playoffs), but ensuring that the Packers’ offense gets the ball at least once and giving Matt LaFleur a little bit of two-point-conversion game theory to work with feels like a net positive for the Pack. Small thing, but the kind of small thing that’s either nothing at all or extremely significant when all’s said and done.
Ok, the Bets
We’re down! I’m bummed. For a long time—upwards of three years—we were always positive in our average return on published bets. To have that end is sad, and a bit disappointing, and it hurts that the thing we had so much good history on—college basketball betting in November, December, and March—proved to be our downfall. Those have been months when, in the past, we’ve taken flight. This year, we crashed.
We’re going to keep publishing the bets. For a while, we said we wouldn’t do it if we dropped under even, but we’ve changed our mind on that for a few reasons: The first is that our futures still have, across all sports, a positive record. The second is that our medium and high-confidence picks still have, across all channels, a positive record. The third is that we like picking games, it’s fun, and if we’re only 51% correct, so be it. There are more expensive hobbies out there, and we’ll continue to be open with you all.
For the time being, we’re going to keep picking basketball games (we still have outstanding futures on Villanova, which could help us close what’s currently an 85-unit all-time deficit once that hedge is done), but we’ll be lowering the confidence in accordance with recent results, down into low-confidence, which are longshots and/or bets where we’re trying to figure a sport out. We’ll keep making picks for auto racing (NASCAR, IndyCar, F1) as well, with the same thought behind those—we’re trying it out. If we build or publish any new models (I’m guessing we’ll at least bring the NHL one back, though college baseball is currently largest on our radar), we’ll experiment with using them to make picks, as they’re designed for such things. What we won’t be doing, unless circumstances change, is making picks on individual MLB games this year. Our history isn’t great on those, and there are so many of them that chasing success on that front could dig our hole much too deep. Instead, we’ll go even heavier into our futures portfolio, where we have great history and the pace leaves space for other work (modeling work, specifically, since that’s always a part of this site that gets short-changed), and we’ll try to outline our overall strategy of crafting a robust portfolio (balancing profit probability with value) in addition to sharing our picks. So, if you enjoy crafting futures portfolios yourself, stay tuned. We’re excited for it, and we’ll be investing a lot of units in it to try to get us back profitable by fall.
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No college basketball tonight, but they’ve got Heat/Celtics and Suns/Warriors on ESPN at 7:30 PM EDT and 10:00 PM EDT, and the Kings play the Oilers in a hockey game with playoff implications at 9:30 PM EDT on ESPN+.
