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 -1.6% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 4,364 published picks, not including pending futures, and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.9% across 1,602 completed high and medium-confidence picks (low confidence picks, these days, are 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 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. For futures bets (in both sports and politics) and motorsports bets, odds are taken from the better option between Bovada and BetOnline as our best approximation of the Vegas consensus, which isn’t currently/accurately available online. KenPom is heavily used in making college basketball picks. FiveThirtyEight’s SPI is heavily used in making soccer futures picks. ESPN’s FPI is heavily used in making NFL futures picks.
South Alabama @ Oklahoma
The South Alabama love from the market continues to confuse me. They had a little comeback in garbage time against Alabama, but they still lost by double digits, and while Alabama is better than Oklahoma, it should be a similar story tonight. The Sooners have gotten back on their feet after an ugly first two games, shutting down UNC-Wilmington on Tuesday to move to 2-1 overall. The Jaguars aren’t much more of a test than the Seahawks, if more at all. What we saw Tuesday should be a truer indication of OU’s ability than what we saw in their openers.
Pick: Oklahoma -11 (-110). Low confidence.
Western Michigan @ Houston Christian
We’re system guys, and sometimes the current system—trusting KenPom outliers with our lives in nonconference men’s college basketball—leads us to uncomfortable places. Places like this one, where we’re picking a team who only scored 31 points in a game eight days ago to cover a single-digit spread.
The thing about this is that it isn’t as much about HCU as it is about WMU. Western Michigan played Minnesota tough, and may have gotten a little buzz for that, but Minnesota’s projected to go 4-16 in the Big Ten, and that’s a median. The probability of the Gophers losing all twenty of their conference games is meaningfully about zero.
There is, granted, a big gap between the Big Ten and Houston Christian. But in what should be an ugly, ugly game, we don’t hate the Huskies to hit enough shots to keep it close.
Pick: Houston Christian +7.5 (-110). Low confidence.
