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 -5% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 3,393 published picks, not including pending futures, and an average return on investment, per pick, of 0.3% across 762 completed high and medium-confidence picks (low confidence picks, these days, are in experimental markets for us). Our ETA to get the overall number back profitable is currently November 5th, the date of a potential World Series Game 7.
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 have a gambling problem, get help.
Lines for these come from the Vegas consensus or the closest approximation available at the time picks are written, unless otherwise noted. For futures bets (in both sports and politics) and motorsports bets, odds are taken from the better option between Bovada and BetOnline as our best approximation of the Vegas consensus, which isn’t currently/accurately available online. FanGraphs is heavily used in making MLB picks. FiveThirtyEight’s SPI is heavily used in making soccer picks.
Nebraska vs. Northwestern
2021 Nebraska might have been the best three-win team ever, losing all of their losses by single digits and all but one by one possession. A lone bright spot? They rocked Northwestern, winning by 49 points in Lincoln.
These aren’t the same teams, and this game isn’t in Lincoln (it’s in Dublin). Nebraska, though, is still the vastly more talented program, and if there’s a psychological element or a coaching element which could lead them to struggle in close games, that doesn’t really affect this pick. If it’s a close game, we’ve already lost. We’re betting on a comfortable Husker victory.
Pick: Nebraska -13 (-110). Low confidence.
Jacksonville State vs. Stephen F. Austin
A little FCS, for the people.
Jacksonville State could maybe have some sort of home-field advantage here, playing the game in Montgomery, not far from their Jacksonville (these guys are in Alabama, we often have to establish that because it’s very confusing). This isn’t a home-field pick, though.
Jacksonville State’s coming off their first losing season since 2002, and while part of this can be tied to them leaving the Ohio Valley, which had gotten rather woeful, there were bad losses. They lost to UT-Martin. They got crushed by Central Arkansas. After the season ended, with the program beginning its FBS transition, head coach John Grass agreed to leave, making room for Rich Rodriguez, something of a splashy new hire but, like a crumb of home-field advantage, probably not a difference-maker here.
The thought behind this is that for as rough as Jacksonville State’s 2021 was, they still beat Stephen F. Austin, and the result was unsurprising. SFA just wasn’t that good, and while they enter the season ranked 10th in the poll of record, that’s probably inflated by an overestimation of their accomplishments, accomplishments boosted by close losses to early-season Texas Tech and a laughably overestimated Sam Houston State (a team which got pounded when they finally ran into even little old Montana State, by no means a national power at the FCS level). The logic train? The short version is that Jacksonville State’s the better program, so as an underdog, we’ll ride them. The long version is that the whole WAC-ASUN was overestimated last year, and that’s carried over into this year, and while Jacksonville State’s part of that, they don’t get the rankings hype Stephen F. Austin gets because they’re leaving the FCS and aren’t eligible for that specific poll. Also, it can’t be hurting their talent level to be moving to the FBS.
Pick: Jacksonville State +7.5 (-110). Low confidence.
Coke Zero Sugar 400 – NASCAR Cup Series at Daytona
With these superspeedway races, a reasonable approach is the following:
- Assign every driver an equal probability of winning.
- Remove those drivers whose cars can’t be expected to hold up, distributing their removed probabilities evenly across the remaining drivers.
- Boost and deduct based on car/driver performance this season.
- Boost and deduct based on historic superspeedway performance by team/driver.
This brings us to Justin Haley.
Haley, driving the #31 car for Kaulig Racing, has won this race before, back when he was driving the #77 for Spire in 2019 (rain shortened the race, but only by a couple dozen laps or so). As Jeff Gluck noted at The Athletic this week, he’s also won four times at superspeedways in the Xfinity Series. He’s a proven superspeedway racer who finished eleventh and seventh at Atlanta this year, twelfth at Talladega, and a less-impressive but not terrible 23rd at the Daytona 500. He’s also playoff-eligible, unlike Corey LaJoie and David Ragan, currently sitting 23rd in points, which is terribly impressive for a Kaulig driver.
Kaulig’s done this enough that the car shouldn’t be expected to fall apart, even if that risk is maybe a little higher for them than for a team like Penske. Haley’s done this enough that he’s about as good a bet as anybody to be in the mix on a reasonably likely overtime restart. If you’ve got a guy at 50-to-1 in the mix for an overtime restart, you’ve got good value, and at a superspeedway, if you’re picking one driver (as we are doing), you’re looking more for value than probability. We don’t have a good chance of winning this. But we’re buying the ticket for a good price.
Pick: Justin Haley to win +5000. Low confidence.
