A lot to get to today. No MLB futures—still in a holding pattern on those—but we’ve got picks for tonight’s baseball, picks for tonight’s football, and our weekly NFL, college football, and NHL futures. Small units until the ALCS or NLCS ends and we get our cash flow back. Away we go.
Game 3: Milwaukee at Los Angeles
I guess the thought here is that Tyler Glasnow isn’t going to go all nine? It just seems like eventually, Jose Quintana isn’t going to keep getting away with a 5.18 xERA.
Pick: Los Angeles to win –172. 0.45 units to win 0.26. Quintana and Glasnow must start.
Game 4: Toronto at Seattle
This one’s sadder. Max Scherzer is a legend. But the guy hasn’t shown much this year, and even if he had, the Mariners are as good as the Blue Jays and the Mariners are playing at home. That alone gets us past the point of a tossup.
Pick: Seattle to win –119. 0.31 units to win 0.26. Scherzer and Castillo must start.
Pittsburgh at Cincinnati
On the NFL side, we’re seeing 5.55 points as the line when we apply our blanket 1.75-point home-field advantage to FPI. That’s close enough to risk rounding error throwing it off (FPI rounds to the nearest tenth).
But, that’s our method, and over a year and a half now, it’s worked often enough to profit in these primetime games. We’ll warily stick with it.
Pick: Pittsburgh –5.5 (–105). 0.54 units to win 0.51.
Tulsa at East Carolina
Tulsa’s outperformed expectations so far this year, but so has ECU. We don’t see any reason not to trust Movelor here.
Pick: East Carolina –16.5 (–118). 0.31 units to win 0.26.
NFC
On the futures side, we really like the Bucs. They’ve got a tough stretch coming up, but their last six games go: Cardinals (H), Saints (H), Falcons (H), Panthers (A), Dolphins (A), Panthers (H). It’s hard to see them winning fewer than eleven games, and with the rest of the NFC already at 1.5 or more losses apiece, it might only take twelve or thirteen wins to get the bye. We’re not saying they should be the NFC favorite, but twice as long of odds as the Packers and Lions?
We’ll also put another unit on the 49ers. They might keep getting hurt, but even if they do, they’re probably going to be in the mix.
Pick: Tampa Bay to win +750. 6.00 units to win 45.00.
Pick: San Francisco to win +1100. 1.00 unit to win 11.00.
Super Bowl
We’ll put another two Bucs units down here, plus one apiece on the Colts and the Steelers, whose records are too good to ignore. Our portfolio’s still unfortunately reliant on a weird Super Bowl, but the nice thing there is that even if just one conference championship goes weird, we should be fine.
Pick: Indianapolis to win +1800. 1.00 unit to win 18.00.
Pick: Tampa Bay to win +1900. 2.00 units to win 38.00.
Pick: Pittsburgh to win +3000. 1.00 unit to win 30.00.
NFC East
Speaking of weird. This probably isn’t going to happen, but 45-to-1 is too long.
Pick: NY Giants to win +4500. 1.00 unit to win 45.00.
Heisman Trophy
On the college side, we don’t love where the Heisman corner of our portfolio’s gone. It’s a tiny corner, but right now it’s Carson Beck as a +4.5-unit outcome and virtually everything else as a 4-unit loss. Fernando Mendoza is rightfully the other favorite—less can go wrong for Indiana than Alabama, and he’s better-liked publicly than Beck is—but 9-to-2 odds are short on a guy who’ll most likely lose his last game before voters submit votes.
We do kind of like Julian Sayin. Ohio State’s the clear national championship favorite, and Jeremiah Smith’s still eating into Sayin’s price despite Carnell Tate having almost as many receiving yards. We’re liable to see some carnage down the stretch. If it isn’t Beck or Mendoza, Sayin is the likeliest to emerge standing upright.
Pick: Julian Sayin to win +1600. 1.00 unit to win 16.00.
College Football Playoff
The basic structure of our college football futures portfolio is that if Indiana, Miami, and Oregon all make the playoff, plus one of Mississippi and Notre Dame, we’re in great shape. From there, we have upside on USC, Illinois, Nebraska, Missouri, BYU, Memphis, Iowa State, Louisville, Utah, TCU, Virginia, UNLV, and Duke, most of whom are longshots but at least one of whom will probably sneak into this thing.
We’re adding Cincinnati to that latter list today. The Bearcats are a Big 12 contender who probably only needs to go 3–1 against Utah (A), BYU (H), TCU (A), and Texas Tech (N) in the scenario where they’re seriously competing for a playoff berth. 3–1 against that schedule is unlikely, but +825? We’ll take that.
Pick: Cincinnati to make playoff +825. 1.00 unit to win 8.25.
CFP National Championship
With so much of that playoff market locked down, we should probably shift our attention to conferences soon. For now, though, we’ll gobble up a little more value on Ohio State, who continues to play like the best team in the country by a significant margin and whose roster is one of only four even theoretically deep enough to hold up through January. Of those other three (Alabama, Georgia, and Texas), it’s possible only one will make the playoff.
Pick: Ohio State to win +325. 5.00 units to win 16.25.
NHL Atlantic Division
More longshots this week, as our NHL model continues to believe in uncertainty. The Red Wings bet here breaks a rule from last week—the one which said we wouldn’t bet on someone whose preseason Gelo was worse than their end-of-season Gelo last year. We’re breaking that because the Red Wings have already eaten up almost two thirds of that gap, and their only loss was to the team who’s overperformed their preseason Gelo by the widest margin (les Habitants, who we got last week in the Eastern Conference market). Neither of these teams will probably win the Atlantic, but we might look up in February and find we’ve got some amazing leverage. Hockey is hard to predict. Woe to the overconfident.
Pick: Detroit to win +2800. 1.00 unit to win 28.00.
Pick: Boston to win +5000. 1.00 unit to win 50.00.
**
I am only roughly 90% confident in these numbers. At some point we’ll get that Google Sheet up which tracks all our bets this year.
2025–26: –456.62 units (started with 1,000-unit bankroll)
2025–26: –7% average ROI (weighted by unit; sample size: 835 single-game markets plus three completed futures portfolios and one partly completed futures portfolio)
Pre-2025: 0% average ROI (worse when limited to only sports)
Units taken from best odds we can find at major sportsbooks available to most Americans.
These bets are not investment advice. If you’re worried you or someone you know might have a gambling addiction, call 1-800-GAMBLER for free, confidential help.
**
