Before we get to tonight’s picks, a note for our regular readers:
We’re starting over with our tracking of these picks.
After seven years of ups, downs, and a massive effort to get back even, we finished 2024 with an average ROI, per unit, of 0%. Over seven years of published bets, we broke even. Unfortunately, this required a little bit of paper betting gamesmanship. While the bets we published on the 2024 election were legitimate, you would have needed to employ a very small unit over the years if you were to actually bet them at the size we indicated. That, or you would have needed a number of offshore accounts, because I’m pretty sure the numbers we used would have gotten you limited with any unit larger than a few dollars.
This didn’t sit well with us. It felt disingenuous. Yes, we were technically 0% paper bettors, but even that isn’t something to be proud of, and we were not 0% sports bettors. With paternity leave creating a large gap in our cadence and the end of the year providing a convenient bookend, we decided this week that when we re-launched the bets, we’d do them differently. Pre-2025 should be considered prehistory for our published bets. They’re quite the story (this started as an effort to provide gambling advice on FCS football), but they’re in the past now.
In addition to the fresh start with tracking, we’re going to handle our units differently. Gone will be the low, medium, and high-confidence picks, plus all the headaches that practice caused when it came to our futures portfolios. Instead, we’ll list a number of units alongside each play. We’re starting 2025 with a 1,000-unit bankroll. This will fund our daily betting plus any futures portfolios for sports whose championships fall in the 2025 year. When August rolls around and we restart the football futures portfolios, those will be the beginning of our 2026 effort.
Our apologies to anyone who was following our 2024–25 football futures portfolios. We didn’t anticipate going completely silent on those once paternity leave hit. We’re sorry for going completely silent with no warning. Thankfully, both the college football portfolio and the NFL portfolio are set to finish somewhere between great or acceptably mediocre, so if you did follow those, we trust you to carry them to the finish line yourself. Still, we’re sorry.
Finally: We might not publish these every day anymore. With a kid around, we’re trying to do more work during the week and less work on weekends. We’d also like to publish football picks earlier in the week, when lines are a little softer.
We’ll have a tracker up soon for the 2025 year. As always, we’ll publish our broad performance numbers within each post.
Now.
Let’s get to today’s action.
CFP Semifinals
We’re going rather big with the units on these, and that’s mostly because time is short. There are not many College Football Playoff games left, and historically, we do well on College Football Playoff games.
I haven’t dug into the numbers yet on this, but my impression is that SP+ is not as strong as Movelor when it comes to betting playoff games against the spread. I don’t want to present this as verified fact—this is based on anecdotal experience; I’d like to dig into the actual numbers before proclaiming this as gospel—but this is my impression. My theory for why this might be happening is that SP+ cares a ton about success rate, and when you narrow the field to the best teams in the country, success rate is always very high. These teams play most of their games against entirely overmatched competition. That’s not as useful a measuring stick as it is when the teams involved are both in the middle of the FBS pack.
Point margin, then, becomes more useful, and so does yards per play, which FPI leans on so heavily. Going off of that, and knowing success rate is lower on Notre Dame than virtually every other stat with predictive value, we’re going to ride with Movelor in both semifinals.
Depending what happens tonight, we might be back with more on Ohio State tomorrow. More to come. We’ll at least be back tomorrow for NFL playoff bets.
Pick: Notre Dame –1 (–104). 50.00 units to win 48.08.
Pick: Ohio State –6 (–105). 25.00 units to win 23.81.
Washington @ Michigan State
On the basketball side, we’re leading off the year with a breakaway layup and no one on our heels. Boy oh boy, do I hope we don’t miss it.
One thing we’ve tested the last few years has been switching to moneylines during conference play rather than trying to bet spreads. After years of getting burned in January and February, the theory is that focusing on the rhythms of conference play is our best option. We’ll usually target odds more in the –350 range, but there just isn’t much else we feel comfortable betting on tonight’s slate. Go Sparty.
Pick: Michigan State to win (–1300). 40.00 units to win 3.08.
**
2025: +0.00 units (started with 1,000-unit bankroll)
2025: TBD average ROI (weighted by unit; sample size: 0 picks)
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.
