We wrote extensively on Friday about the numbers surrounding tonight’s national championship. We also already placed half our national championship units, a week ago this past Saturday. So, if you’re looking for more from us on this game, you can find it. A short version, with conference championship picks and college basketball to follow:
Ohio State vs. Notre Dame
We got Notre Dame at 9.5 when the market initially opened. We’ve seen the number as low as an even 8. We’d take any number in that range, to be honest, and a few lower than 8.
Our power rating system, Movelor, has plenty of shortcomings. In the playoff so far, though, it’s been on top of things. It pointed towards a first round full of double-digit results. It indicated Notre Dame was a top-three team before the market came around to that idea. It downplayed Georgia and Texas’s ability to compete. The one thing it really missed was Ohio State vs. Oregon, but while that gives us pause, Movelor has reacted pretty dramatically to Ohio State’s results. It has the Buckeyes 6.1 points better than it did after the loss to Michigan, and at that point, Movelor was higher than the market on Ohio State. Did Ohio State get more than six points better? Did Notre Dame get worse? Or is the market maybe undervaluing a team the market’s undervalued since the end of September?
Our bet is on the third possibility. We’re rolling with our system, though we understand Ohio State’s the vastly more talented team.
Pick: Notre Dame +9 (–115). 25.00 units to win 21.74.
AFC and NFC Championships
We’ll revisit these later this week, but on the early lines, we like the Commanders and the Bills.
Regular readers know our approach to these: We take the gap between each team’s FPI rating and add two points of home-field advantage. This is extremely simple, but FPI’s underappreciated as a system because ESPN markets it poorly.
We wouldn’t advocate using this approach over the long term, but it’s worked well this year. It worked throughout the regular season. In the playoffs, we’re 5.5–3.5–1. It’s gone well enough that we’re going to bump our units on each of these games from 20 to 30, which means we’re placing 15 units on each today. We’ve had a good football season. We have a bad recent history with college basketball. If we want to stay in the black until April, we need to try to make at least a little hay where there’s hay to be made. The sun’s shining.
Sparknotes: FPI with two points of HFA says Bills by 0.9 and Eagles by 5.5. We might end up betting both sides of this Eagles/Commanders game if the line moves.
Pick: Commanders +6 (–120). 15.00 units to win 12.50.
Pick: Bills +2 (–110). 15.00 units to win 13.64.
College Basketball: Rutgers at Penn State
We had an ok thing going. Not a great thing, but an ok thing. We were betting moderate moneyline favorites, and we were betting kind of big units (40 per pop, or roughly 4% of bankroll), but we were steadily winning small quantities. Then, these last five days, we went 6–4. I don’t know if expanding to two per day was what did us in or if we were doomed from the start, but our history isn’t good enough to keep riding that strategy.
Instead, we’re going back to spreads and totals, and we’re trying our “find a good spot” approach on the spreads. The totals are kind of a subtle hedge, and a little bit of an attempt at something adjacent to middling. We often like favorites in the same games where we like overs, and underdogs when we like unders. Faster-paced games give teams more time for the score to spread out. What we find in the market, though, is that the correlation isn’t real. Favorites and overs aren’t correlated with any sort of significance.
If the correlation’s real? It’s a hedge. If the correlation’s fake? We’re trying to exploit that vulnerability. Really, we like Penn State in this one and we’re willing to risk a coin flip on this strategy aimed at not losing both.
Why do we like Penn State?
Puff Johnson’s likely absence matters, but he’s a bigger name than he is a player. He’s Penn State’s second-best player, but the gap between him and potential replacements isn’t all that large, at least using EvanMiya. Meanwhile, Ace Bailey puts up big numbers but is often chaotic, and he’s probably shooting more threes right now than Rutgers would ideally see him shoot.
Penn State’s a good enough team to weather a little stretch without Johnson. They’re good enough to beat Rutgers at home, even without their second-best guy. We think they’ll do it with some room to spare.
Pick: Penn State –7 (–115). 10.00 units to win 8.70.
Pick: Under 157 (–115). 10.00 units to win 8.70.
**
I am only roughly 90% confident in these numbers. We’ll get that Google Sheet up soon which tracks all our bets this year.
2025: +11.64 units (started with 1,000-unit bankroll)
2025: 1% average ROI (weighted by unit; sample size: 24 games)
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.