Editor’s Note: Over a sample size of 797 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 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.
Stanford @ UCLA
The bulk of Stanford’s non-conference schedule was uninspiring: yes, they played Kansas and Butler, but they played just one road game, and the bulk of their contests can accurately be called tune-ups.
It’s unsurprising, then, that there’s skepticism regarding the Cardinal. They’ve played well, but they’ve beaten nobody of any stature, their best victories coming over Oklahoma and Washington, both of whom could very well miss even the NIT when all’s said and done.
Still, the skepticism is a bit undeserved. They played Butler to the buzzer. They’ve held every opponent except Butler—including Kansas—below one point per possession, a significant threshold near the national average. The Cardinal defense may actually, as a counter-intuitive function of that weak non-conference slate, be undervalued even by advanced metrics, because it’s hard to accumulate significant gains against inferior competition when systems are adjusting for that inferior competition. Right now, KenPom has Stanford’s defense rated as the twelfth-best in the country. Judging by KenPom’s track record, that’s probably right. If it’s wrong, though, it may be more likely it’s underrating the unit than overrating it.
Pick: Stanford +1 (-110). Low confidence.
