Editor’s Note: Over a sample size of 813 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 9% when weighted by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high). This, compared to other picks consistently published online, is very good. It’s also good when compared to conventional annual investments, and instead of taking a year to bring that return, it’s taking between three hours and seven months. In short, Joe’s got a good track record.
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Three picks for tonight.
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 KenPom, FanGraphs, Baseball Savant, Team Rankings, 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. 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.
Fairleigh Dickinson @ Merrimack
Merrimack is the newest Division I basketball team and as such is not yet eligible for most postseason play (I believe they’d be allowed to play in the CIT, were they invited, or the CBI, as Cal Baptist did last year). This could end up being disappointing for the NEC, because as of right now, Merrimack’s in first place, and they’ve got the head to head victory over one of their main competitors in St. Francis (PA). No low-major league wants to lose an automatic bid of any sort.
Fairleigh Dickinson has disappointed on the season after winning last year’s NEC tournament. They returned a sizable share of minutes, but the pieces haven’t clicked.
This line dropped significantly after opening, and it’s unclear why. One possible explanation is that bettors think FDU may have turned a corner, seeing as they beat Central Connecticut State by 23 Monday night. CCSU, though, is one of the worst three or four teams in Division I, and while Merrimack’s own thorough victory Monday, which came over SFPA, should be taken with a grain of salt given the Red Flash were missing Isaiah Blackmon and Tyler Stewart to suspensions (there was a fight between SFPA and Sacred Heart, and no, I don’t know why our NIT correspondent hasn’t covered all this chaos yet), it was still convincing. Even if one takes that game out of the equation, this line undervalues the NEC leader.
Pick: Merrimack -4 (-110). Low confidence.
Tennessee-Martin @ Eastern Illinois
There are reasons to believe Eastern Illinois’s recent skid (five straight losses from 12/21-1/11) is making too big an impact on their evaluation by oddsmakers. For one thing, all five losses came on the road. For another, three came by five points or fewer, with two coming by one possession. Third, only the final two games of the stretch are ones in which EIU would be favored were the games occurring today, and in neither would they be likely to be favored by more than four.
EIU does have its work cut out for it tonight. Tennessee-Martin, though atrocious defensively, can score points, and EIU’s defense is suspect. There’s a narrative that it’s been playing worse since Deang Deang went down in mid-December, but that’s one the numbers don’t really support: their adjusted defensive efficiency, per KenPom, has changed by less than one point per one hundred possessions in his absence. That isn’t a lot.
Since the skid, Eastern Illinois has won back to back games, the latest one a demolition of Tennessee Tech in which the Panthers scored 84 points over just 71 possessions. Tennessee Tech is not as good a team as UT-Martin. Their defense, though, is better. Don’t expect 84 out of EIU tonight, but don’t be surprised if it happens.
Pick: Eastern Illinois -7 (-110). Low confidence.
Weber State @ Montana State
If you read these picks regularly, and/or use them yourself, you may know we’ve been burned more by picking against Weber State than we have by any other team this year, and you further know we’ve been getting burned overall these last three weeks or so.
We’re back for more.
It’s simple enough: Our point differential in three picks against Weber State is a combined negative sixteen. These have been narrow losses—one came in overtime, one by two points, and one by eight. With multiple, differently-designed models pointing to this as one of the better picks of the night, and with Devin Kirby a potential x-factor for Montana State that these models aren’t considering, it’s reasonable to take another shot against Weber.
As far as the burning over the last three weeks: yes, it’s been rough, but this is part of the deal. Methods go hot and cold. It’s concerning that the downturn’s coincided with the beginning of conference play, because it suggests our methodology might be missing something, and there aren’t many encouraging underlying numbers. One thing that is encouraging, though, is that our rolling 40-pick point differential and its corresponding Pythagorean W-L have moved in a positive direction over the last two days. We can make no promises, but the overall sample is still strong, and the hope is there that the small tweaks we’ve made to our method will straighten things out.
Pick: Montana State +3.5 (-105). Low confidence.
