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 –1.0% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 7,032 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.2% across 2,268 completed high and medium-confidence picks. The low confidence picks are the problem. Most of our picks are in the low confidence category.
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 from 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 kenpom heavily to make college basketball picks. We use our own college basketball model to evaluate college basketball futures.
Active markets today: College basketball, but only in single-day form. No futures markets open by the time we got to these.
Single-day college basketball bets: On the season, we’re 133–100–1 and we’re down 6.06 units. We went through a stretch of mostly betting moneyline favorites, so our win–loss record doesn’t line up with our net loss. We went back to those moneylines yesterday and it went well. We’ll be trying more of the same today.
College basketball futures: We started these on Friday, February 23rd with 350 units in our portfolio. We had a bad Champ Week, but we’ve got some solid value alive.
Auburn vs. Yale
Duke vs. Vermont
This is gross, but we don’t feel good about much on today’s board, and we’re heavily in on Colorado in futures betting so we don’t feel the need to look at that (and we’re very scared of Florida—the difference is just that the market loves Florida in the futures space, where their odds are inexplicably different from Colorado’s despite that game being roughly a tossup). We don’t like Yale or Vermont to pull off the upset today. We’ll ride with that.
Pick: Parlay – Auburn & Duke to win (–401). Low confidence.
Nebraska vs. Texas A&M
Nebraska is better than Texas A&M, and we think that matters enough. We’re a little scared of the matchup, but we’re comforted by the SEC’s underperformance and the Big Ten’s overperformance in March so far. Talked a little yesterday in the notes about conference correlation.
Pick: Nebraska to win –110. Low confidence.
NCAA Tournament
Ten more futures today, and the approach is the same as yesterday: If it’s got a good eROI according to our model, and if we don’t think there’s a red flag the model doesn’t have effectively baked in, and if it isn’t too redundant, we take it.
A lot of Colorado and Dayton in here. Colorado we already liked. We saw some mispricing going on yesterday, and that remains. They’re at 18-to-1 to make the Final Four and 125-to-1 to make the national championship. That’s broken. Add in Kentucky and Texas Tech going down, and if the Buffs can win the two this weekend (huge if, of course), we might be able to lock in profitability already on Monday with a well-placed hedge.
Dayton we liked too, and we still like them here. Their defense isn’t their calling card, but they were masterful down the stretch (Sam Vecenie had a good tweet about this late last night), and tipping off against Arizona at 9:45 AM Arizona Time probably means at least something. Arizona’s the type of team that kind of thing is more concerning with than, say, Houston. Arizona’s loose and plays best when they’re comfortable. You could make a theory that says they’re a little too loose and therefore upset-prone. Thankfully, the value’s good enough that we don’t even need to make that theory.
Pick: Alabama to make Elite Eight +375. Low confidence.
Pick: Duke to make Elite Eight +390. Low confidence.
Pick: Colorado to make Elite Eight +800. Low confidence.
Pick: Dayton to make Elite Eight +900. Low confidence.
Pick: San Diego State to make Elite Eight +1600. Low confidence.
Pick: Dayton to make Final Four +3300. Low confidence.
Pick: Colorado to make national championship +12500. Low confidence.
Pick: Houston to win national championship +600. Low confidence.
Pick: Illinois to win national championship +3000. Low confidence.
Pick: Colorado to win national championship +20000. Low confidence.
