Today’s Best Bets: Sunday, January 7th

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 –2.0% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 6,408 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.

Active markets today: College basketball; NFL; college football futures. Our NFL futures worst case bettered dramatically with yesterday’s results, so we’re not doing anything additional on that front today.

Single-day college basketball bets: On the season, we’re 30–36. We’re down 7.47 units. Yesterday ended badly.

Single-game NFL bets: On the season, we’re 20–31–8, and we’re down 13.11 units. We just keep losing.

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 about 104 units so far. We’ve never lost more than 25% of a futures portfolio before, but this might be the time it happens. We are very sorry. We do believe in our upcoming picks, for whatever that’s worth.

Michigan State @ Northwestern

We don’t have a great read on today’s other Big Ten action, but we like Northwestern to surprise Michigan State today. It feels like the narrative’s gotten a little bubbly around the Spartans, and Northwestern is not a bad team.

Pick: Northwestern to win +135. Low confidence.

Dallas @ Washington

This is an unusually high NFL line, and that’s what we like about it. We sometimes think with games like these that there’s too much hesitation about letting a line go too high. Of course, we’re terrible at this, and we don’t have any shred of positive history like we at least do with college basketball. But this is the move for today, from us.

Pick: Dallas –13 (–110). Low confidence.

FCS National Championship
CFP National Championship

We can’t get our best-case to even with the 19 units we have left to bet, so we’re only putting eight of them down on this. We’re hoping to find an alternate line at +135 tomorrow for the remaining eleven. Here are the scenarios, given what we’ve bet:

Pick: Parlay – South Dakota State to win, Michigan –4.5 (+123). Low confidence. x8