Editor’s Note: Over a sample size of 882 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 6% when weighted by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high). This, compared to other picks consistently published online, is pretty good. More broadly, it’s adequate 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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One pick for tonight, plus a pair of futures in the MVC.
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, 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.
Lehigh @ Colgate—Patriot League Quarterfinals
Lehigh’s played well of late, winning five of their last seven in the regular season, holding Colgate within one possession in one of the two losses, and opening the Patriot League Tournament with a win Tuesday night.
With a few different bounces, though, they’d have gone 2-5 over that stretch, or lost on Tuesday to a visiting Loyola-Maryland.
There just isn’t much to like about Lehigh’s chances tonight, going into Colgate’s gym for a game in which it’s hard to think of any reason the Raiders would be taken by surprise. Expect a smooth victory from the one-seed.
Pick: Colgate -10.5 (-110). Low confidence.
Future: Missouri Valley Conference Tournament Champion
This pair of futures starts with Valpo. Valpo finished seventh in the MVC in the regular season. Their highest-usage player, Javon Freeman-Liberty, is expected to return tonight, but he’s missed the last two games with mono. Nick Robinson, who started three quarters of the games he played this year, is out for the remainder of the season with a back injury.
Valpo is reeling.
And we can take advantage of that.
Even with Valpo in a bad place, they’re still undervalued at these odds. Our model has them just more than four percent likely (LINK) to win the MVC Tournament, meaning even if one reduces that probability by a third, the expected ROI on the play would be 15%. Given they’ve played two of their best games this season (double-digit victories over Bradley and Missouri State) without Robinson, and one of those best two without Freeman-Liberty, a reduction in those odds of one-third looks reasonable if not excessive after accounting for the small sample size, and not even looking at how the remaining healthy players are, on the aggregate, more productive on the season than Robinson, and in a few individual cases more productive on a per-possession basis than Freeman-Liberty.
With Valpo in the fold, SIU becomes a nice accessory. The Salukis are likely to be an underdog in every tournament game they play (the only scenario in which they’ll be a favorite is if the Drake/Illinois State winner knocks off Northern Iowa tomorrow, with SIU also advancing). There isn’t a lot to like about their performance on the year. As an inducer of chaos, though, they have their pluses. They play a very down-tempo game offensively, one that often ends in threes, a combination of tendencies that amplifies randomness, giving them a disproportional chance of beating better teams. They’re also adept at forcing turnovers despite fouling very little, something that served them well when they generated 16 turnovers from UNI this January while only yielding four free throws. Across the bracket from Valparaiso, they’re a useful counterbalance, with about a one-in-five chance at least one of the pair makes the title game, and potential opportunities to hedge along the way.
Pick: Southern Illinois (+4000). Low confidence.
Pick: Valparaiso (+4000). Low confidence.
