Editor’s Note: Over a sample size of 478 completed bets (this doesn’t include outstanding futures picks), Joe’s picks published here and back at All Things NIT, our former site, have an average return on investment of 4% when weighted by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high). This, compared to other picks consistently published online, is pretty good. It would be a decent annual ROI for an investor. But instead it’s coming, on average, on each of these picks.
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Three picks today.
As always:
- Lines come from the Vegas Consensus at the time this is written, or the best approximation I can find of it online.
- Data and predictions from FanGraphs, Baseball Reference, Baseball Savant, Spotrac, Sagarin, Massey Ratings, and ESPN is/are often used and/or cited.
- The blurbs often aren’t justifications of the picks. Often, they’re instead just notes about something or someone related to the pick. Something that interests me. You are not required to read these. I don’t explain the picks because in general, the rationale behind each pick is the same, so it would be boring to say over and over again that the numbers I use project a good return on investment and I see no red flags significant enough to make me hold off.
College Football
Delaware State @ Delaware
Our college football model isn’t posted yet, and the FCS piece of it is likely at least a week and a half away from going live. But were you able to peruse it, you’d see Delaware in the Colonial Athletic Association’s second tier. Since I’m guessing you’ve never been roped into following the FCS for a season, like I was last year, that might not mean much to you, but the CAA is the second-best league in the subdivision. James Madison runs the show, but the Playoffs feature a number of CAA teams annually, including an unusual six last year—a quarter of the entire field. In short, Delaware, like a lot of teams, is on the bubble.
Delaware State does not share its neighbor’s FCS prowess. The HBCU struggles not only against the FCS as a whole, but within its own conference, the MEAC, which it’s won only once since 1991.
The teams’ relationship was the subject of some controversy back in 2007, when ESPN ran an article accusing Delaware of not scheduling Delaware State for racist reasons. Delaware had some legitimate defenses against the claim (they scheduled a number of other HBCU’s annually, they played Delaware State in other sports, Delaware has historically been pretty good at football at the FCS level, Delaware State has not been), but the fact the two had never played was certainly strange, and a bad look for the more affluent Delaware. The piece ended up being prescient, as two months after it ran, the two teams met in the Playoffs, with Joe Flacco leading Delaware to a 44-7 victory en route to a loss in the national championship.
Since that playoff meeting, the teams have played seven more times, with Delaware winning each by double digits. And while the outcomes have likely been disappointing for Delaware State, the game’s happening almost every year, and I’d assume it’s good for the program to play a game with some significant local attention. So whether the initial motivation stopping its scheduling was racism or not, Jeff Pearlman—the Delaware alum who wrote the piece for ESPN—seems to have accomplished his goal.
Pick: Delaware -26 (-110). Low confidence.
Southern Illinois @ Southeast Missouri State
Southern Illinois plays in the Missouri Valley Football Conference, which is different from the standard Missouri Valley you might know from basketball and other sports, though it does have a number of the same teams. It’s far and away the strongest FCS conference, and not only because it has North Dakota State, titan of the FCS. When averaging Sagarin and Massey Ratings (as our model does to evaluate the FCS), one finds eight MVFC teams among the FCS’ top 14 entering this week, and two of the non-MVFC schools come from the Ivy League, which doesn’t participate in the playoff.
Southern Illinois is not one of those eight teams. It’s not in our model’s top 25. But it still figures to be competitive: while it’s only favored by our model in three games this season, it’s a single-digit underdog in seven. With MVFC teams likely needing seven or eight overall wins to have a chance at the Playoffs, it’s important for the Salukis to get the victory tonight in Cape Girardeau in a game our model gives them a 50.07% chance to win.
Pick: Southern Illinois +6.5 (-110). Low confidence.
MLB
Pittsburgh @ Colorado
I’ve written about the Rockies’ pretty-bad offense recently, but it’s worth reminding everybody: The Rockies rank 27th in baseball in wRC+ (which adjusts for park factors). Despite playing half their games at Coors Field, which has a park factor of 1.432 on the year (meaning one would expect 43.2% more runs to be scored there than in an average MLB stadium), they rank only eighth in runs scored. With David Dahl still sidelined by an ankle injury, they have only three above-average hitters on their entire roster.
The Rockies still do score a lot of runs, especially at home. But that doesn’t mean they have a strong lineup.
Pick: Under 14.5 (-110). Low confidence.
