Editor’s Note: Over a sample size of 838 completed bets (this doesn’t include outstanding futures picks), Joe’s picks published here and back at All Things NIT, our former site, have an average return on investment of 9% when weighted by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high). This, compared to other picks consistently published online, is very good. It’s also good when compared to conventional annual investments, and instead of taking a year to bring that return, it’s taking between three hours and seven months. In short, Joe’s got a good track record.
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One pick today—a future, since the board tonight isn’t giving much ground.
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, 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.
NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship
First off, you can find this at 40-to-1 in some places, so don’t settle for 30-to-1 unless you have to.
Now, the rationale:
The concern with Arizona is their bad losses. St. John’s in San Francisco by three. Oregon State in Corvallis by 17. Arizona State in Tempe by one. Other title contenders (with the exception of Duke, whose pair of poor showings we’ll probably dig into more in a separate post soon) don’t have these warts on their team sheet. But Arizona isn’t in the realm of those title contenders. They’re in the realm of pushing to get a four-seed so they can be assured of opening the tournament in Sacramento instead of having to travel who knows where for the first weekend. They’re in a different category altogether from what we think of when we say “title contenders,” and there’s a lot to like about them.
Sean Miller’s team has no significant flaw this year, unless you count inexperience as a flaw. They aren’t the best at very much, but they also aren’t particularly bad at anything. They’re a well-rounded, solid, young team with a few very good players. They’re also, on paper, the best team in the Pac-12, and with Oregon remaining at home and a victory already over Colorado, they’re in a good position for potential tiebreakers. They’re tied right now for the league lead in the loss column, and they project to be favored in each of their remaining games, making them far and away the most likely team to win the Pac-12 Tournament, even if the probability of that happening is only 39% (Oregon’s at 21% and Colorado’s at 18% in our model). It’s hard to imagine a team with even eight losses (they’re at six right now) and a Pac-12 Tournament title landing a seed worse than a four-seed this season, given that the league, while not great, has a respectable coalition at the top.
There’s also a geographic piece to this that might not help them, but almost certainly won’t hurt them.
If Arizona ends up as a four-seed or higher, they’re nearly assured to playing in Sacramento, given that Gonzaga, Oregon, and San Diego State are the only other west-of-the-Rockies teams in the running for one of those seeds, and Gonzaga and Oregon would both be sent to Spokane before being sent to Sacramento. Sacramento isn’t next door to Tucson—it’s a significant flight—but it’s a much longer flight from everywhere else in the country, meaning Arizona should have a bit of a travel advantage in the second round, barring some UC-Irvine first-round upset, in which case travel will be the least of Arizona’s advantages. It’s a small thing, but it’s an asset not many teams have, with college basketball’s good teams disproportionately coming from Central and Eastern Time.
Overall, our model has Arizona as the tenth-most likely team to win the national championship, as of today. It has their median overall seed still a five-seed, but just barely. If they take care of business in this upcoming three-game stretch, a manageable slate that includes USC and UCLA at home along with a trip to Berkeley, they’ll enter Palo Alto on February 15th most likely in an effective tie for the league lead with either Colorado, Oregon, or Stanford themselves. They’ll have moved up in the polls, and their odds will have shrunk. A lot can go wrong, but that should be true of any pick at these odds. Get them now, because if they do win these next three, and they then beat Stanford, their odds will probably be something like half this long.
Pick: Arizona to win (+3000). Low confidence.
For those following at home, here is our futures picks portfolio at the moment in order of eROI (expected ROI, based on our model):
- Duke (10-to-1, placed 12/25, 71% eROI)
- Butler (100-to-1, 12/5, 54%)
- West Virginia (28-to-1, 1/27, 53%)
- Penn State (100-to-1, 12/5, 36%)
- Arizona (30-to-1, 2/3, 27%)
- Michigan State (14-to-1, 1/3, -30%)
- Ohio State (17-to-1, 12/5, -58%)
- Purdue (40-to-1, 12/4, -80%)
Combined eROI: 9%
Likelihood of Profit: 35.3%
