Today’s Best Bets: Thursday, October 17th

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% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 7,954 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2% across 2,411 completed high and medium-confidence picks. The low confidence picks are the problem. Most of our picks are in the low confidence category.

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 from 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 rely heavily on FanGraphs for all our MLB action. We rely heavily on Nate Silver’s presidential election model for our election futures. For college football bets, we primarily use our own model. For NFL bets, we lean on ESPN’s FPI.

Our active markets today are MLB futures, single-game college football, and both NFL and college football futures. Here’s the context on each:

MLB futures – In four of the five years we’ve done these, we’ve profited, twice by large margins. We began this season with 750 units in our portfolio. We placed two medium confidence bets most weekdays throughout the regular season, as usual, then pivoted to placing a more variable number throughout the playoffs, as usual. We’re currently big fans of the Guardians and Mets, and we do not want the Dodgers to win it all.

Single-game college football bets – Our history here is mediocre, and we’ve had a bad first half of this season, with a 17–24 record so far. We’re down 8.68 units heading into tonight.

Single-game NFL bets – We published these for the first time last year, and they went terribly. So far this year, though, we’re 11–8 and up 2.25 units.

World Series

We’re not going to place a negative-value bet yet. We don’t like where things are going, but we’re not going to panic right now. Instead, we’ll take the only positive value we can find, which is this long, long price on the Guardians. They’re a narrow favorite today.

Here are the new scenarios for our portfolio:

Pick: Cleveland to win +1900. Medium confidence.

Boston College @ Virginia Tech

We are not high on Virginia Tech. We don’t think the fact that they’re three plays from 6–0 is meaningful, and we don’t think the teams they lost to are as good as their reputations. Meanwhile, we think pretty highly of what Bill O’Brien’s accomplishing at Boston College so far, building well on what Jeff Hafley left.

Still, we doubt Boston College has made as much progress this year as the market seems to believe. The idea seems far-fetched. This is a limited offense, one that’s yet to score 30 points against an FBS team. Give us the Hokies to win with a little cushion.

Pick: Virginia Tech –8 (–110). Low confidence.

Denver @ New Orleans

We’ve been trusting FPI, and it’s gotten us this far, even with two tough ones on Sunday and Monday night. It has the Saints only 1.4 points worse than the Broncos on a neutral field. Usually, the gap between FPI and the spread is not this large.

Obviously, a lot of this has to do with Derek Carr’s absence, but FPI already has New Orleans as the fourth-worst team in the NFL. This line would imply that either FPI’s underestimating the Broncos or that the Saints are the second-worst team, almost as bad as the Patriots.

We’re not going to deviate from our system. Our best guess is that there’s a little bit of Sean Payton overrating going on. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.

Pick: New Orleans +3 (–120). Low confidence.