We picked up another pair of wins yesterday, bringing our record to 4–0 on the very young year. For those who missed Thursday’s reboot, here’s that post, and for those interested in picks for the NFL’s Wild Card round, we published those yesterday.
Today, we’re going to dip our toes into the CFP National Championship Game market. We don’t really expect the line to move too much on this. This isn’t a “we think the line is going to move” bet. We just have thoughts already, so we figured we’d at least get some of our units down. After that, we’ll get to our college basketball plays for today and tomorrow. One warning there: Today’s game tips off very soon.
CFP National Championship
We were going to trust Movelor on this no matter what. Our only questions were when to place bets and how much to place. We’re setting 25 units aside for future use on this, in case odds do change, but as we said above, we don’t expect significant changes.
We do think Notre Dame’s better than Notre Dame’s getting credit for being. The Irish are 12–2–1 this year against the spread, and while that’s meaningless on average, because on average the market properly corrects, that average includes times when the market overcorrects and times when the market undercorrects. We’re betting on this being an instance of the latter.
But while we do think highly of Notre Dame, the bulk of this bet is about Ohio State. When Ohio State’s good? Sure, they’re unbeatable. But the average Ohio State performance is not 9.5 points better than what we expect to see from Notre Dame.
Maybe Ohio State does show up. They’ve done it in two of their last three games, and they found a way to cover comfortably in the end last night despite returning to more average play (for them). We’ve seen plenty of national championships end in blowouts. But I have a hard time believing the line would be this wide if Ohio State was playing Georgia or Penn State. We just saw Notre Dame favored by one against both those teams. This feels like a line where the sportsbooks are anticipating the public to have a strong opinion in one direction. As Nate Silver has pointed out regarding the Super Bowl and March Madness, heavy public involvement makes markets less efficient.
Pick: Notre Dame +9.5 (–110). 25.00 units to win 22.73.
College Basketball
On the hardwood this weekend, we like Pitt to survive Louisville’s visit today and Purdue to survive Nebraska’s tomorrow.
The Pitt game fits all our criteria for these conference moneylines: They’re probably the better team (see: kenpom), they’re playing at home, they’re coming off one loss, and their opponent enters on a small, meaningful but not overly concerning winning streak.
Purdue isn’t as perfect for the role, but there are fewer options on Sundays, and we do think Nebraska’s large home winning streak could create a tacit expectation within that locker room to lose at home and win on the road. That can happen with good, not great basketball teams.
Pick: Pitt to win (–165). 40.00 units to win 24.24
Pick: Purdue to win* (–385). 40.00 units to win 10.39.
*Purdue plays tomorrow. This post will be updated after moneylines are widely available. (Update: The post has been updated.)
**
We’ll get a full tracker into a Google Sheet soon, but…
2025: +92.75 units (started with 1,000-unit bankroll)
2025: 60% average ROI (weighted by unit; sample size: 4 picks)
Pre-2025: 0% average ROI (worse when limited to only sports)
Units taken from best odds we can find at major sportsbooks available to most Americans.
