We were close to a 3–0 night last night, but the Bengals’ offense kept answering, and the result was a winning but unsatisfying evening. Here’s an attempt for a 2–0 night. (We’ll have the rest of our weekend picks up tomorrow morning: We’re thinking five college football spreads, Sunday Night Football, and two college basketball moneylines, though we may do an over for tomorrow and a moneyline for Sunday.)
Cal @ Wake Forest
Starting with college football: All of Movelor, SP+, and FPI have Cal narrowly favored to cover here. We don’t have any particular belief in Wake Forest. We think Cal’s string of close losses might have left them undervalued. We don’t think the extra time off particularly favors either of them. There are fewer red flags here than on the other teams we think will cover. We’ll roll with the Bears.
Pick: Cal –7 (–120). Low confidence.
Houston Christian @ Texas
We believe in overs right now, based on their success last year and their success so far this year. We don’t know how to pick them, though, so we used a random generator to pick from the list tonight. This is the one it gave us.
Pick: Over 149 (–120). Low confidence.
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How we do this, and how we’re doing:
Single-game college football bets: We’re always mediocre on these, but we’ve been awful this year. We’re 30–40–1 so far, down 12.72 units. We’re 2–7 over the last seven days. We do use Movelor, our model’s rating system, to guide these, but we don’t always follow its lead. Maybe we should. Or shouldn’t! Or should simply flip a coin.
Single-game college basketball bets: These have been a rollercoaster for us historically, but on the aggregate, results have been negative. This year, we’re betting one or two games a day, at least to start. We may taper that off. We use kenpom heavily. We’re 1–3 on the season, down 2.05 units.
Overall: Over 13,904 completed published bets, we average a 0% return, weighting by unit (1 unit for low confidence; 2 units for medium confidence; 3 units for high confidence). Our sports betting history, however, is terrible. We’ve managed to make up for it with strong performance in election bets over the years, but it’s taken a lot of election bets.
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These are for entertainment purposes and are not at all investment advice. If you think you might have a gambling problem, please call 1–800–GAMBLER to learn more and/or seek help.
