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 0.4% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 1,996 published picks, not including bets that remain pending, like futures. 0.4% 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.
Washington State @ Stanford
In our bracketology, we use a metric that combines SOR, NET, KPI, and a dash of KenPom as our base for what the committee thinks about a team. On Monday morning, Washington State’s number was 84th in the nation, despite the Cougars sitting at a confident 35th in KenPom, implying they are, truly, the 35th-best team in the country. That gap is the tenth-biggest in the country, trailing only Oregon State among Power Five teams, implying only nine teams nationally and one team in Washington State’s world have underperformed more severely than the Cougs.
Part of what’s driving this gap is how well Wazzu’s played recently against mediocre competition. Kyle Smith’s team has beaten Cal, Utah, and Colorado over their last three games—all played at home—by an average of more than 17 points, in the process climbing from 50th in KenPom to 35th while margin-blind systems (mostly, in the case of SOR, I believe) shrug their shoulders at the routine victories.
Now that WSU’s going on the road, the market likes them to keep the thing going, and it especially likes this idea against Stanford, who leads the Pac-12 in overperformance by the same measure we used to highlight Washington State’s underperformance two paragraphs ago. It’s a classic overperformer vs. underperformer matchup, and the market smells a big win for the bubble aspirant.
In this case, though, the market’s gone too far. Even KenPom, the basis for the idea that this is an over/underperformer matchup in the first place, only has the visitors favored by a point. The spread, as it stands, leans toward the Cardinal. It’s our best play of the day.
Pick: Stanford +3 (-110). Low confidence.
