Today’s Best Bets: Friday, January 5th

Editor’s Note: Since November 2018, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. Overall, the results have been mixed, with an average return on investment, per pick, of –1.9% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 6,403 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.3% across 2,266 completed high and medium-confidence picks (low confidence picks these days are mostly in experimental markets for us).

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’re afraid you might have a gambling problem, seek help.

Odds for these come the better option between Bovada and BetOnline. We used to use the Vegas Consensus, but it’s no longer consistently available in an accurate form online. We use Movelor heavily to make college football picks. We use kenpom heavily to make college basketball picks. We use FPI heavily to make NFL futures picks, but not spreads and totals.

Active markets today: College basketball; college football futures. We’re sorry to push NFL futures back another day, but we want to make sure we get everything right with the scenarios. We’ll have this week’s NFL futures tomorrow.

Single-day college basketball bets: On the season, we’re 29–33. We’re down 5.17 units, but we’re 8–6 over our last 14 and up 2.86 units over that stretch.

College football futures: We started the season with 300 units in our college football futures portfolio, with the intent being to spend 200 of those over the season’s fifteen weeks and keep 100 in reserve for hedging and arbitrage opportunities. We’re down about 104 units so far. We’ve never lost more than 25% of a futures portfolio before, but this might be the time it happens. We are very sorry. We do believe in our upcoming picks, for whatever that’s worth.

UConn @ Butler
Illinois @ Purdue

Along with the rest of you, we don’t really see Illinois winning in West Lafayette tonight without Terrence Shannon Jr. So, we’re using that to juice the one we’re more nervous about: UConn’s trip to Butler. We’re worried about UConn on the road, and we like Butler at home coming off two tough road losses, but we do think the UConn program is probably figuring out this early-season road thing. We think it’s a bug, not a feature, and so we think it has their attention, and when things have this program’s attention, they usually work out well for the Huskies these days.

Pick: Parlay – UConn & Purdue to win (–143). Low confidence.

FCS National Championship
CFP National Championship

After yesterday’s portion of the Hail Mary, our scenarios looked like this, with 57.23 units left in our portfolio’s cash flow:

With the line moving to 4.5 today, today’s move leaves us in the following position:

Two days to go. 19 units on today’s.

Pick: Parlay – South Dakota State to win, Michigan –4.5 (+124). Low confidence. x19