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One pick for tonight.
As always:
- Lines come from the Vegas Consensus at the time this is written, or the best approximation I can find of it online.
- Data and predictions from KenPom, FanGraphs, Baseball Savant, Team Rankings, and ESPN is/are often used and/or cited.
- The blurbs often aren’t justifications of the picks. Often, they’re instead just notes about something or someone related to the pick. Something that interests me. I don’t explain the picks because in general, the rationale behind each pick is the same, so it would be boring to say over and over again that the numbers I use project a good return on investment and I see no red flags significant enough to make me hold off.
Yale @ Brown
The numbers have Yale winning this one by eight. The numbers aren’t factoring in familiarity—Brown’s last game was last Friday night against Yale, and while I lack any data on how teams perform when facing each other in quick succession, it’s fair to theorize the “hard to beat a team twice” theory might be holding this line down.
One thing the numbers are factoring in is the ending to Yale’s victory over Howard on Monday afternoon.
Howard is having a bad season. KenPom has them 349th out of the 353 Division I men’s basketball teams. Yale beat them by 14 on Monday. It wasn’t that close.
It’s unclear exactly when the change happened, but at some point, it appears Yale may have let off the gas pedal. Through 30 minutes, there had been something like 48 possessions, and Yale led 61-42, yielding roughly 0.88 points per possession. Against Howard, who’d be expected to score 0.92 points per possession against an average defense, this wasn’t all that impressive—especially from Yale, who’d be expected to allow a matching 0.92 points per possessions to an average offense. Still, it was solid. Not Yale’s best performance, but a fine one.
The change, though.
Over the last ten minutes, there were roughly twenty possessions—a significant, though not huge, increase in pace. More significantly, Yale allowed 35 points. For ratings that don’t cut off the sample when win probability nears 100%, this was the equivalent of dropping a boulder in a bathtub. It changed the entire numerical complexion of the game, making it look, on paper, like Yale really laid an egg defensively.
Yale did not lay an egg defensively, and while it’s fair to speculate that they may not have let off the gas, it’s more of a reach, given that the first thirty minutes went so close to exactly how one would expect.
I don’t know if recency bias is swaying this line. I don’t know if the last ten minutes of the Howard game are swaying this line. I don’t know if familiarity between these teams hurts, helps, or doesn’t affect this line. Whatever the case, it’s two points lower on Yale than it should be (or two and a half), and it’s easier to find reasons for it to be three or more than it is to find reasons it should be this low.
Pick: Yale -6 (-110). Low confidence.
