Five college football picks for today, our Sunday Night Football pick (no bets published tomorrow), plus our final election mini-portfolio from the effort that started early this summer. More context at the bottom, after the picks.
Duke @ Miami
Movelor’s preseason expectations have proven more correct for Duke than for just about any other program this year. The Blue Devils are currently rated only half a point worse than where they were in August. We feel good about where Movelor has Duke. Miami, then, would have to be almost as good as Texas for this to make sense. Miami’s offense is good. But we struggle to believe Miami is almost as good as Texas.
Pick: Duke +21 (–115). Low confidence.
Kansas State @ Houston
I’m very surprised the line got this low. I don’t know whether this is concern about a K-State trap game or a belief that Willie Fritz is figuring things out at Houston, but I’d imagine K-State would be able to play fairly methodical football this afternoon and move the ball up and down the field. K-State’s another team who hasn’t moved much from its preseason projection, and Houston’s moved even less than Duke. We’re fairly comfortable saying that these guys are who we’ve thought they are.
Pick: Kansas State –11.5 (–110). Low confidence.
Arizona State @ Oklahoma State
Maybe we’re walking into a trap here (and with this next one too), but Mike Gundy’s Oklahoma State Cowboys sitting as a home underdog against Arizona State is too good a conceptual opportunity to pass up. It’s been a long, long time since Mike Gundy missed a bowl game, and Arizona State’s played better than expected this year, but they’re not Indiana.
Pick: Oklahoma State +4.5 (–110). Low confidence.
UMass @ Mississippi State
This is the other one where we fear a trap. Basically, we still think UMass is the team it was last year. A slightly better version, sure, but that team. And we think Mississippi State has a lot of frustration to take out on somebody.
Pick: Mississippi State –18.5 (–115). Low confidence.
Louisville @ Clemson
Lastly: Is today the day Louisville finally breaks through and doesn’t lose one of these by exactly seven points, the number by which all of Notre Dame, SMU, and Miami beat them?
Yes and no.
Clemson’s a good team who hasn’t been playing its best football.
Pick: Clemson –10.5 (–105). Low confidence.
Indianapolis @ Minnesota
Even with a lot of Anthony Richardson baked in, FPI has the Colts only barely worse than the Vikings on paper. Should we trust FPI completely? No. But doing that has us 16–10 on NFL picks this year. Our only concern here is that there’s some late line movement we’ve been capturing by publishing on Sunday afternoon which we’ll miss by publishing early this week. We don’t think that would hold up to a rigorous examination.
Pick: Indianapolis +5.5 (–110). Low confidence.
2024 U.S. Presidential Election
We have 56.5 units remaining, so we’re putting 56 units on Kamala Harris to win Virginia here. It isn’t the best value out there, but it’s positive value and it’s a comfortable probability. There’s better than a 90% chance Harris does win Virginia.
Where this leaves our overall portfolio is that in most scenarios, we profit by more than 10%. We had higher goals coming into this, but the likeliest outcome with this collection of mini-portfolios is a profit lower than our historic 17% margin. The two realistic scenarios where we lose money are:
1. The very narrow one in which Harris wins New Hampshire but loses the popular vote and all seven states currently labeled swing states.
2. The broader but unlikely one where Trump wins Virginia and/or states expected to be bluer than Virginia, like Maine and Oregon and New Jersey.
What did we learn from the exercise? If we want to space our portfolio out over time, we should do it more like monthly instead of weekly, or jump in after big trends when we have no reason to believe Nate Silver’s model is still “catching up” as polling data comes in.
Overall, though, I think the takeaway should be that it’s easy to make a 10% profit on elections and it’s hard to make a 30% profit on elections. These markets offer a ton of layups: Virginia –600, for instance. If we were doing this again, we’d do a higher number of layups, a few scattered high-value longshots, and not very many bets on swing states. We’d make our goal 10% and be happy for anything we got above that. On Monday, when we publish our standalone portfolio, we’ll be exclusively taking those layups.
Pick: Democratic Candidate to win Virginia –600. Medium confidence. x28
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How we do this, and how we’re doing:
Single-game college football bets: We’re always mediocre on these, but we’ve been awful this year. We’re 28–34–1 so far, down 8.50 units. We do use Movelor, our model’s rating system, to guide these, but we don’t always follow its lead.
Single-game NFL bets: We got smoked on these all year last year, to the point where I think we might’ve even stopped placing them. This year, though, we’re 16–10 so far, up 4.69 units. We lean on FPI to make these picks.
Election futures: These have been our best market historically, with a 17% overall ROI and significant profits both times we’ve done them—in 2020 and 2022. We use Nate Silver’s election models, and we make money. We started this year with a 1,000-unit portfolio and a plan to bet it as a series of 20 mini-portfolios, each leveraged against itself. This is the 20th of those mini-portfolios. So far, we’re up 18.50 units, all of which have gone back into the bets. We’re going to do a second election portfolio on Monday, a standalone portfolio, but this first portfolio is a continuation of the process we started back around the Fourth of July.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,483 published bets. We weight our units by confidence: 1 unit for low confidence, 2 for medium, 3 for high. Our all-time return is very, very bad. –5.5%. Worse than coin flip betting. Most of this is because our MLB futures portfolio just got smoked, but even before that, we were around a 2% all-time deficit. As we’ve been saying, we’re going to bet enough on election market layups to get back even all-time, but our track record on published sports bets is terrible. We can’t in good conscience recommend anybody follow our bets, even beyond the legal disclaimer piece.
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These are for entertainment purposes and are not at all investment advice. If you think you might have a gambling problem, please call 1–800–GAMBLER to learn more and/or seek help.
