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 –0.7% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 6,693 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.2% across 2,268 completed high and medium-confidence picks. The low confidence picks are the problem. Most of our picks are in the low confidence category.
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.
Active markets today: College basketball, NFL futures. We’re doing some bonus futures today because we have high cash flow in that portfolio and we like the Bucs, as we’ll get to later on.
Single-day college basketball bets: On the season, we’re 46–50. We’re down 11.69 units. We’ve been making small gains over the last few days, but we’d like to accelerate those this week. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot we like today.
NFL futures: We started the season with 150 units in our NFL futures portfolio, intending to spend 100 of those over the season’s eighteen regular season weeks and keep 50 in reserve for hedging and arbitrage opportunities. So far, we’re up a bit more than five units. This is circular, because we use FPI to make the picks, but FPI’s probabilities show us with an expected total return on the 150 units of 22.31 units, or 7.4%.
Oregon @ Utah
Utah is banged up. Utah is also a better team than Oregon and they’re playing at home, where they’ve yet to lose this season. Give us the Utes to help chip away at our season-to-date deficit. Despite their road woes, they’re probably the second-best team in the Pac-12 when everybody’s healthy.
Pick: Utah to win –250. Low confidence.
NFC
It’s not just that this is a trap game for the Lions, or that we’re skeptical of the Lions more generally because their schedule didn’t offer them a lot of strong tests (especially over the back half of the year). We’re also a little high on the Bucs. Looking back through the Bucs’ scores, the most recent red flag came in October. There were some losses in there to non-playoff teams—we’re using a very different rubric than the one we’re using for the Lions—but these are really long odds. We see some value here, and we’d rather burn a unit on it this week than have to think about it as a hedge next week, especially with so much Niners upside in our portfolio and fairly little Lions downside.
Pick: Tampa Bay to win +1600. Low confidence.
Super Bowl
We’re only putting five units down here, but the Ravens look like the best team in the NFL, and by some margin. The Niners weren’t very impressive yesterday. The Ravens were. It’s recency bias, but it stretches back beyond yesterday.
Pick: Baltimore to win +200. Low confidence. x5
