Editor’s Note: For a little more than 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 0.00% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 2,029 published picks, not including bets that remain pending, like futures. So…dead even. All of that, for dead even.
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.
We’ll start with basketball, then go to IndyCar and NASCAR.
UConn @ Georgetown
Georgetown should struggle to score. Their best avenue for getting on the board is from beyond the three-point line, and UConn doesn’t allow many opportunities out there. UConn might not struggle to score, but their offense is rather reliant on brute force offensive rebounding, something that by nature tends to lower possession counts. All of that is baked into each team’s overall tempo and efficiency numbers, but it should be exacerbated by the other, just enough to make this a good play.
Pick: Under 145.5 (-114). Low confidence.
IndyCar: Grand Prix of St. Petersburg
We haven’t done as much data digging yet on IndyCar as we have on NASCAR, so we aren’t comfortable going wide with our assortment on this one. Instead, we’re going to concentrate our chips on one driver, one with a good track record in St. Pete and a great track record on the circuit as a whole.
Josef Newgarden is valued lowly today, possibly because he’s starting ninth. At St. Petersburg, though, three of the last five winners have started eighth or worse, and while that’s a selective sample (the same is true of only four of the last fourteen winners), what it really means for us is that Newgarden has a chance, and with three of the eight drivers starting ahead of him not winners of an IndyCar race last year, including polesitter and defending Rookie of the Year Scott McLaughlin, this really does seem to be where the value lies. There are probably more good bets out there, but this is the one that stands out.
Pick: Josef Newgarden to win +1400. Low confidence.
NASCAR: Wise Power 400 (Auto Club Speedway; Fontana, CA)
Kyle Busch is the trendy pick, having finished in the top three in each of the last three races in Fontana and winning there in 2019. If you give him a 75% chance of being a top-five caliber car, and a 20% chance then of winning if in the top five, that comes out to a 15% chance of a win, which may be aggressive, but is far enough ahead of the 12.5% threshold needed to justify a pick at these odds to account for the likely overstatement.
A similar case can be made for Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano. Keselowski’s been in the top five in each of the last four races at this speedway, while Logano was in the top five in three of the last four. There seem to be some doubts as to Keselowski’s car quality, but with old teammates Logano and Ryan Blaney sitting at half his odds, the question becomes whether RFK Racing is really only half as likely to produce a winning-quality car as Penske. Penske’s not Hendrick. The gap shouldn’t be that big.
Speaking of Blaney, he won last year’s race at Michigan, the closest comparison to Fontana on the circuit, and finished in the top five in California in 2019. Kevin Harvick had a bad season in 2021 but was also in the top five here in 2019, and he won three straight at Michigan across 2019 and 2020. Finally, Alex Bowman won here in 2020, and for as good as Kyle Larson is, we aren’t sure the gap between him and accomplished teammates like Bowman should be quite this large.
It’s an antithetical portfolio to last week’s at Daytona, but that makes sense—Daytona is much more random than California. This gives us the best value of anything we could find today. We’re rolling with it.
Pick: Kyle Busch to win +700. Low confidence.
Pick: Joey Logano to win +1000. Low confidence.
Pick: Ryan Blaney to win +1200. Low confidence.
Pick: Alex Bowman to win +1400. Low confidence.
Pick: Kevin Harvick to win +1500. Low confidence.
Pick: Brad Keselowski to win +2000. Low confidence.
