Another week of football is only a couple hours out, so in addition to the World Series, we’ve got our futures for the week in both the NFL and the college game. Let’s hit the baseball, hit the football futures, hit tonight’s football, and…that’s going to be it today. The double batch of election bets needed to be pushed back to tomorrow. I underestimated the size of college football’s Week 9 until I sat down to write our weekly preview.
World Series
We wrestled for a long time last night with how to keep approaching this. We think the value’s on the Yankees, but it’s very narrow. We have upside on the Yankees, but it’s small, and our Dodgers downside is enormous. We want to plan for different scenarios, but we don’t have any leverage. What to do?
At the moment, our thought is that the series is almost exactly 50/50, and so is every game. So. We’ve got a 75% chance of getting the series out of Los Angeles with the Yankees at least tied. If we can get there, this value might really be turning into at least a little bit of leverage. Until then, we’ve got 62.31 units of upside on the Yankees, 460.27 units of downside on the Dodgers, and 289.73 more units to play with. That incorporates all the previous wins and losses in the futures portfolio this season.
Pick: New York (AL) to win +117. Medium confidence. x16
Heisman Trophy
We’re in a fine spot still on Ashton Jeanty, but we’ve finally come around on Cam Ward. We have enough doubts about him that we’re only going to put one unit down today, and we’re still hoping voters will come around to Bryson Daily, who’s even more historic than Jeanty and whom we bet last week at 180-to-1. For now, though, one unit on Ward.
Pick: Cam Ward to win +250. Low confidence.
College Football Playoff
We’re going to put two of our five non-Heisman futures units this week on Ohio State to win it all. We like the Buckeyes’ value a lot, expecting them to be favored in each of their remaining games up until possibly the national championship. By putting two units on it, our portfolio’s now profitable in this market in 56% of our model’s simulations, with futures also out there on Texas, Alabama, Notre Dame, Penn State, and Clemson. We’re missing some contenders, most notably Georgia, but the Buckeyes should be the favorite, and we’re happy to get them at this cost.
Pick: Ohio State to win national championship +450. Low confidence. x2
For our other futures, we’re putting two units on Notre Dame to make the playoff and one unit on SMU. Notre Dame’s chance at 10–2 is likelier than some think, thanks to Army and Navy. With SMU, we dislike this in our gut but we’re seeing great value. They don’t have to beat Clemson or Miami to make the ACC Championship, and their BYU loss will look better to the committee than it is in reality so long as BYU doesn’t dramatically implode. (And if BYU does, another spot might open up for the ACC.)
Pick: SMU to make playoff +250. Low confidence.
Pick: Notre Dame to make playoff –160. Low confidence. x2
NFC North
We have an opportunity to corner the NFC North, provided the Bears don’t win it. I’m not especially worried about that scenario. The Lions are available at good value, and we have enough upside on the Packers and Vikings to make ourselves profitable in this division if we put two units on Detroit. So, two units on Detroit it is.
Pick: Detroit to win +120. Low confidence. x2
NFC East
Similar situation here, though we’ll need to dodge both the Cowboys and the Giants. If the Eagles win the East, we get 0.15 units. If the Commanders win it, we get 1.9.
Pick: Philadelphia to win +115. Low confidence.
AFC South
This is more a value play. We don’t have anything else on the AFC South. That’s how those other divisions started too.
Pick: Indianapolis to win +550. Low confidence.
AFC
Going back to standbys now, we’ll add one more unit on the Bills to win the AFC. We don’t have enough on Kansas City to profit if they do win the conference, but we tend to think the Bills are right there with them, the Lions, and the Ravens as one of the best teams in the NFL. So, another unit, hoping to maximize our leverage in the event more Chiefs (and hopefully Ravens) value never materializes.
Pick: Buffalo to win +550. Low confidence.
NFC
It’s a similar story here in the NFC. We’re of course worried about the Niners, but the best thing we can do about that is to keep buying the Lions at a good price. From what we know, the Niners are in a bad, bad position. No need to outsmart ourselves and try too hard to buy low.
Pick: Detroit to win +375. Low confidence.
Syracuse @ Pitt
Our instinct on this says that Pitt will win close, in an ugly game. We don’t trust Pitt, and we don’t trust Syracuse, and that leads us to think something nasty will happen.
We’re guessing a lot of people have that instinct, especially with this line moving towards Syracuse as the day’s gone along. So, as much as we want to bet on a mess, we’ll roll with the Panthers to stay unbeaten, and with a little wiggle room.
Pick: Pitt –5 (–110). Low confidence.
Minnesota @ LA Rams
On the topic of instincts:
We would have guessed most folks’ instinct here would be to bet the Rams. Sean McVay’s season’s up against the wall and with the Vikings coming off a loss, you could get a sense that Sam Darnold’s about to turn into a pumpkin. We’re surprised, then, that this line is as far away from the Rams as it is.
With college football, we allow ourselves a lot of leeway to make judgment calls. With our NFL picks, we’re just trusting FPI until we find a reason to pivot.
Pick: LA Rams +3 (–125). Low confidence.
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How we do this, and how we’re doing:
MLB Futures: We started the year with 750 units in this portfolio. This is something we’ve done each of the last five years. Twice, we profited by large amounts. Twice, we only narrowly profited. Once, we lost about 25% of the portfolio. We could make history this year. We heavily employ FanGraphs to make these picks.
College football futures: We’re doing two portfolios this year, the first a 150-unit normal futures portfolio like the ones we do for many sports, the second a 100-unit Heisman-specific portfolio. If you’d like to track them, plus our NFL futures, you can do so on this Google Sheet. Our history here is decent. We’ve generally made small profits, but only small ones, and last year came very close to disaster.
NFL futures: This portfolio’s 200 units large. Our history’s ok with these. We’re slightly profitable all-time, but we’ve only done them for two years and we only profited in one of the two.
Single-game college football bets: We’re always mediocre on these, but we’ve been awful this year. We’re 21–29 so far, down 9.77 units. We do use Movelor, our model’s rating system, to guide these, but we aren’t entirely reliant on it.
Single-game NFL bets: We got smoked on these all year last year, to the point where I think we might’ve even stopped placing them. This year, though, we’re 12–10 so far, up 1.20 units. We tend to lean on FPI to make these picks.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,079 published bets. We weight our units by confidence: 1 unit for low confidence, 2 for medium, 3 for high. Our all-time return is –2.6%, per unit. On 2,528 medium and high-confidence bets, it’s +0.9%. Obviously, this is bad, but we do expect to get back to even through the World Series and presidential election. In all honesty, we’re just going to pour enough units into inefficient election markets to wipe out our deficit.
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