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 –1% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 6,230 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.3% across 2,266 completed high and medium-confidence picks (low confidence picks these days are mostly in experimental markets for us).
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 Movelor heavily to make college football picks. We use kenpom heavily to make college basketball picks. We use FPI heavily to make NFL futures picks, but not spreads and totals.
We’ve got college basketball. We’ve got our daily college football futures action, navigating the second leg of the FCS semifinals. We’ve got bowls. Here’s the context on each market.
Single-game college basketball bets: On the season, we’re 20–22. We’re down 3.94 units, and we’ve lost nine picks in a row. We are not having fun right now.
College football futures: We started the season with 300 units in our college football futures portfolio, with the intent being to spend 200 of those over the season’s fifteen weeks and keep 100 in reserve for hedging and arbitrage opportunities. We’re down a little more than 40 units so far, but we have upside remaining. More importantly: All of the bets we list here grade out as positive-value bets unless we explicitly mark them as a hedge. So, if you’ve been faithfully following, we’re still on track to not lose more than 25% (and we retain upside), but if you’re new, these are a good place to start.
Single-game college football bets: On the season, we’re 73–75–3. We’re down 8.04 units and down 5%. Won two bets last weekend, though. So that was fun.
Update: We’ve added an NFL pick to the bottom. Forgot there were games today. We’re 17–24–7 on the season and down 8.76 units on those.
Arizona vs. Purdue
We believe Arizona is a very good team right now. We don’t believe they’re the best team in the country. We’ll still take Purdue or UConn on that one, and with this in Indy, we’re riding with the Boilermakers to reassert themselves.
Pick: Purdue +2 (–110). Low confidence.
North Dakota State @ Montana (Hedge)
We don’t think this is good value. We still think North Dakota State should be narrowly favored. But the market didn’t come back to us for long, and we want to at least place some hedge. With these now down, our scenario in the FCS championship will be one of the following, taking our FCS futures as a whole:
If Montana beats NDSU, we’ll effectively have an 8.4-unit bet down on Montana to beat SDSU, which would pay 8.6 units.
If NDSU beats Montana, we’ll effectively have a 35-unit bet down on NDSU to beat SDSU, which would pay 95 units.
If NDSU beats Montana by exactly one point, we’ll effectively have a 29-unit bet down on NDSU to beat SDSU, which would pay 101 units. That’s the dream today.
What we do with whichever leverage or lack of leverage we have will depend on where the odds fall and what happens with our Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl futures, which will close before the FCS National Championship happens.
Pick: Montana to win –130. Low confidence. x9
Bowl Games
With the exceptions of 1) the FCS bowl and 2) bowls where we feel the market and zeitgeist both have a bad read on a particular team, we’re betting moneyline underdogs to start this bowl season. The thinking here—which we have only partly gone to the trouble to back up—is that bowls are very random and that moneylines don’t adequately account for uncertainty, instead hewing too close to their regular season relationship to spreads. We’ve checked the relationship between moneylines and spreads—that part of this checks out. Moneylines are basically the same, per point, as what they’d be in the regular season. We haven’t confirmed how random bowls are. It’s possible the uncertainty isn’t as high as we’ve guessed. So, take this with the appropriate grains of salt.
For the FCS exception: The SWAC champion has underperformed the last few years in the Celebration Bowl, but I’m thinking that was a Deion Sanders thing more than an issue with our understanding of how the SWAC and the MEAC measure up to one another. FAMU’s been the best HBCU team all year, and we expect them to grab that specific national championship today with some margin for error.
Pick: Florida A&M –7 (–115). Low confidence.
Pick: Ohio to win +130. Low confidence.
Pick: Louisiana to win +119. Low confidence.
Pick: Miami (OH) to win +198. Low confidence.
Pick: Fresno State to win +151. Low confidence.
Pick: Boise State to win +195. Low confidence.
Pick: Cal to win +160. Low confidence.
Minnesota @ Cincinnati
We’ll take the Bengals bait. The Vikings did just hold the evidently mighty Raiders offense to zero points, though, and we do continue to lose bets all over the place. So. There’s that.
Pick: Cincinnati –3 (–115). Low confidence.
