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 0.7% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 1,975 published picks, not including bets that remain pending, like futures. 0.7% 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. ESPN’s SP+ is heavily used in making college football picks of all kinds, and FPI is used in making conference championship futures picks.
Indiana @ Iowa
This is a rather classic, two-roughly-equal-good-teams-playing-a-conference-game situation. Iowa could really use a win, sitting at just 1-3 in the Big Ten, within shouting distance of falling onto the bubble, and facing a road trip to Minnesota and Rutgers that, speaking in probabilities, is more likely to leave them with a bad-feeling loss than to leave them with a winning conference record. Indiana is coming off two comfortable wins over a probable tournament team and a possible tournament team, and after this they go to Nebraska before getting three straight home games.
In short, it’s a situation where it certainly feels like Iowa will win. The question, then, is whether the spread’s too wide, and that question circles back to how each team plays. Indiana thrives on its defense. Iowa thrives on its offense. This isn’t actually a rule, but there’s a sense in which Iowa winning probably means a higher-scoring game overall. If you’re looking for a play tonight, you can do worse than that logic.
Pick: Iowa -4.5 (-111). Low confidence.
