Editor’s Note: For a little more than three years now, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. Overall, the results have been positive, with an average return on investment, per pick, of 0.8% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 1,979 published picks, not including bets that remain pending, like futures. 0.8% doesn’t sound amazing, but relative to what else you get on the internet?
Use these picks at your own risk. Only you are responsible for any money you lose, and you should not bet more than you can afford to lose. If you have a gambling problem, get help.
Lines for these come from the Vegas consensus or the closest approximation available at the time picks are written, unless otherwise noted. KenPom is heavily used in making college basketball picks.
Purdue @ Illinois
I’m hesitant to talk takes like this, since numbers usually tell us the full story, but there’s a case to be made that Illinois is the best team in the Big Ten, and we’re going to make it.
KenPom, the best measurement we have of every college basketball team’s quality, says Purdue is a point or two better than the Illini on a neutral floor. This isn’t nothing. It’s comparable to the gap between the 19th-best team in the country and the 30th, meaning with just a little wiggle it could be as big as the gap between a projected Sweet Sixteen team and one expected to lose in the first round.
Why could one reasonably disagree?
It isn’t Kofi Cockburn and Andre Curbelo. Cockburn, as you might know, missed the first three games of the season, and Illinois suffered bad losses (looked worse at the time, but still pretty bad) against Marquette in one of those games and against Cincinnati in his first game back. Curbelo, as you also may know, has missed all but four games with a neck injury and could return today. But while these things definitely impact Illinois’s rating…Cockburn’s been back for a long time now (enough for the system to adjust), and Curbelo’s been out for a long time now (also enough for the system to adjust), and Curbelo isn’t guaranteed to play today and isn’t guaranteed to play significant minutes if he does.
Instead, it has to do with what each team’s done recently.
One of the limitations of systems like KenPom is that it’s susceptible to understating the dominance of a particular victory. It relies heavily on margin, in effect (it’s not exactly this, but it’s effectively this), and when teams are as much better than their opponents as Illinois and Purdue have been lately, KenPom isn’t getting as telling of data as it is when they, say, play each other. Illinois can beat Michigan with its B game. Purdue can beat Nebraska with its C game. And for a good run now—the last six games for Illinois, four or five of the last six for Purdue—each has been able to play a game not representative of their best. When Purdue was tested, it didn’t go particularly well, and while it went well enough for KenPom to still rate them the sixth-best team in the nation entering today, it may be over or underestimating them in the absence of great data. With Illinois, there’s no great data to be had. Depending what you think of Michigan, Illinois has either just played one tournament team in the last month or hasn’t played a single tournament team in the last month. They’ve been skipping through the bottom reaches of the Big Ten. They scheduled Missouri back when Missouri was better than most of Conference USA (they aren’t anymore). Illinois has not been tested in a while, and in this case, it’s not a reason to bet against them.
I might be wrong here. I might be wrong about Illinois being better than Purdue, and my logic might be flawed. There may be an element of KenPom I’m not understanding here. But while there’s a difference between saying a team’s the Big Ten favorite and saying they’re the best in the Big Ten, and Illinois is clearly the former and not so clearly the latter, after today, I’m guessing we’ll be able to say both.
I-L-L.
Pick: Illinois -1 (-110). Low confidence.
