Today’s Best Bets: Monday, January 22nd

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 –0.7% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 6,694 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 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 FPI heavily to make NFL futures picks, but not spreads and totals.

Active markets today: College basketball, NFL futures. We’re doing some bonus futures today because we have high cash flow in that portfolio and we like the Bucs, as we’ll get to later on.

Single-day college basketball bets: On the season, we’re 47–50. We’re down 11.29 units. We’re up 3.01 units over the last five days, but that is a highly selective sample.

NFL futures: We started the season with 150 units in our NFL futures portfolio, intending to spend 100 of those over the season’s eighteen regular season weeks and keep 50 in reserve for hedging and arbitrage opportunities. So far, we’re up a bit more than five units. This is circular, because we use FPI to make the picks, but FPI’s probabilities show us with an expected total return on the 150 units of 17.64 units, or 5.9%.

Wake Forest @ North Carolina

UNC is not going to go undefeated in the ACC, good as UNC is and bad as the ACC is. Wake Forest is a good, solid team. But I don’t think Wake is going to catch UNC off-guard. I think the ACC has noticed Wake by now.

Pick: North Carolina to win –355. Low confidence.

Cincinnati @ Kansas

Here as well, it’s just too easy to like Bill Self’s team coming off a loss. Cincinnati is a good team who could give KU a game, but the ingredients for a big road win aren’t quite there. We’ll take our chances on it.

Pick: Kansas to win –370. Low confidence.

NFL Futures (Hedges)

After yesterday, here’s where our scenarios check in, looking ahead to the Super Bowl:

We like where we are. We have upside on favorites and downside on underdogs. We are, though, playing an uncertain game, and we only need about 25 units of profit to be able to round our all-time, all-bets average ROI per unit to an even 0% (if we can break even on other bets over the next three weeks). So, we’re going to place some hedges.

If you’ve been following these futures all year and would rather preserve the upside, do that. It’s the smarter thing in terms of pure eROI. We’re going to temper our edges, lock ourselves into new profit this weekend (a Chiefs/Lions combo would now net us +0.35 AFC/NFC units, any other result would net us more), and nearly eliminate our downside. We still would really like the Niners and Ravens to win this weekend, but we’re going to put 23 units to work here. If we had a positive all-time average ROI already or if we’d gone through a full NFL futures season before, we might be less risk-averse. Here’s the new table:

Pick: Kansas City to win AFC +163. Low confidence. x15
Pick: Kansas City to win Super Bowl +350. Low confidence. x5
Pick: Detroit to win Super Bowl +850. Low confidence. x3