Editor’s Note: For three years now, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. Overall, the results have been positive, with an average return on investment, per pick, of 1.3% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 1,872 published picks, not including bets that remain pending, like futures. 1.3% doesn’t sound amazing, but relative to what else you get on the internet?
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. KenPom is heavily used in making college basketball picks. ESPN’s SP+ is heavily used in making college football picks of all kinds, and FPI is used in making conference championship futures picks.
We’ll start with our college football futures hedge (we’re also in on one moneyline from yesterday), then do the college basketball play for today.
Big 12 Championship; Big Ten Championship
This isn’t terrible value—it isn’t good value, but it isn’t awful. More importantly for us, though, it locks us into a profit on the conference championship portion of our futures portfolio. Our best case is still Oklahoma State, Alabama, and Michigan all winning, but this will get us over the line and give us a leg up heading into the playoff (where we’re in on Georgia and Alabama, meaning we may be able to hedge our way through as soon as Monday).
Pick: Parlay – Baylor to win, Iowa to win (+1270). Low confidence.
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And in college basketball:
Winthrop @ Coastal Carolina
This didn’t get a lot of attention, because South Carolina is pretty bad, but Coastal smoked the Gamecocks on Wednesday in Conway. Beat ‘em by 24. It’s not a great CCU team, but they’ve got a high ceiling, and their median is good enough that this should be a tossup with them playing at home.
Pick: Coastal Carolina +3 (-110). Medium confidence.
