Well, the Yankees blew Game 5, and our 2024 MLB futures portfolio became the worst futures portfolio in the nearly six-year history of these bets. We lost 52% of it. Compared to what we were about to lose in the event the series was a sweep, this was ultimately kind of a success? Ouch.
What did we learn? I don’t think the takeaway is that we need to hedge more aggressively with our portfolios. That can be part of the portfolio approach, but hedging defeats the purpose of a lot of betting. I think the bigger takeaway is that sometimes, even in our strongest market historically, we’re going to lost 52% of a futures portfolio. What we need to optimize is how we budget units towards these portfolios.
Are futures portfolios a good idea at all? I’m not sure. We are 100% amateur bettors. I know professional bettors aren’t big on the portfolio idea, and I understand why. The difference here is that professional bettors are good at winning single-game bets. We’re not. Futures markets are, to our skillset, more inefficient than single-game markets, and therefore exploitable. IF…we don’t get out over our skis and put too many units into one single portfolio. Which is what we did here.
What next, then? We’re going to put a ton of units into one single portfolio. Clearly, we’ve learned our lesson. (Don’t worry. They’re all going to be heavy favorites. The opposite of our MLB portfolio.)
As promised, we’ll finish our primary election portfolio before the election itself. The final units there should be coming tomorrow. After that, we’ll have a second, standalone election portfolio, also as promised. We’re going to put enough units into that second one to get ourselves back to even in the event all the huge favorites win. We’ll be transparent about this process—we’re not trying to fool anyone and make ourselves look better at this than we are—but our basic approach going forward is going to be to make our sports futures portfolios more similar in size to one another than they’ve previously been, and to only bet as much as we can cautiously expect to make back via election betting. If we can make three thousand units on one election, we can only risk losing three thousand in the two years between each one.
We’re also going to change our betting cadence a little. We’re making a decent number of changes to cadence elsewhere here at The Barking Crow as we approach the birth of a child sometime in the next three weeks. For betting, we’re going to start publishing our football bets ahead of the weekend, rather than on weekend mornings themselves. We may or may not publish college basketball bets on weekends, but for at least this weekend, look for all college football bets tomorrow, as well as the Sunday Night Football bet. Don’t expect us to publish bets on Saturday or Sunday. If we do, those will be that standalone second election portfolio.
With that…
We fight back.
AAC football, Thursday Night NFL, and this week’s football futures. As is routine, our track record and approach are included at the bottom of the post.
Tulane @ Charlotte
Movelor, SP+, and FPI are all in agreement on the spread here, more or less. We all favor Tulane by between 17 and 21 points. The only difference worth noting is that while Movelor and FPI rank Tulane in the 30’s within the FBS, SP+ has Tulane 59th. Does SP+ also have Charlotte lower? Kind of. In power rating, yes, but that translates to a similar ranking. SP+ views the curve itself as differently shaped.
Charlotte’s going with DeShawn Purdie at quarterback tonight, which is noteworthy given Charlotte’s shuffled its quarterback a lot this year, at least partly due to injury. Purdie has the best numbers of the three quarterbacks they’ve used. Is he worth three to six points? Our general theory on college quarterbacks always says no. The quarterback position is overvalued in general, but it seems especially overvalued in college. In the NFL, it’s overvalued but important. In college, we’re at a different portion of the quarterback curve, one where the quarterbacks are more tightly packed together and the best programs often have more than one guy on their roster capable of starting under center.
Still, we’re wary, because betting markets are more accurate than any of Movelor, SP+, and FPI. Are there any other angles explaining the gap?
We see another, but it also points towards betting Tulane. A piece of conventional wisdom we sometimes see thrown around is the idea that games are closer on weeknights. Something having to do with the short week. Is it true? I don’t know. But in general, we tend to believe markets overvalue most things which can be labeled conventional wisdom, when they value them at all.
For those reasons, we’re willing to bite the bullet on this 14.5-point spread, a scary number. Tulane’s shown a willingness to blow teams out this year. Charlotte’s been up and down, but they’ve been capable of getting blown out, even lately. To get back to Purdie: He’s better than Max Brown, who threw three picks against Navy, but he’s not turnover-proof. Give us the Green Wave’s polish, even if we’ve eyed Charlotte moneylines at times this year.
Pick: Tulane –14.5 (–110). Low confidence.
Houston @ NY Jets
Our NFL approach is much simpler: We trust FPI. That’s what’s worked through 25 bets this year, as our win percentage sits at 60%, always betting against the spread, never taking an alternate line. It’s a small sample, but we’re not going to go try to find anything better while the sample grows.
FPI currently has the Texans only one point better than the Jets on a neutral field. Home-field advantage is bigger than that.
Pick: NY Jets –2 (–115). Low confidence.
Heisman Trophy
We were excited to see Travis Hunter’s big game on Saturday. He’s still our highest-upside realistic option not named Bryson Daily. (I’m still shocked Daily hasn’t gotten a Heisman hype news cycle, but I do still think it will come.) Still, we’re concerned about his ability to stay healthy, and that upside’s already there. We don’t really need more of it.
Instead, we’ll bet this week on Cam Ward, who’s putting up slightly better numbers than Dillon Gabriel and is comparably likely to finish the pre-Heisman portion of the season 13–0. Gabriel’s getting to the point where we may have to bet him soon, but we think Ward still has the edge, especially with more media liking him early in the year as their purported own dark horse. Heisman voters are often the exact kind of people who vote for their own takes. The vote is a take in and of itself. With Ward also having the longer odds between the two, he’s our move.
Pick: Cam Ward to win +350. Low confidence.
CFP National Championship
We’re still seeing some opportunity in playoff markets, but we’re seeing a lot of it in the national championship market this week.
We’ll start with Oregon, on whom we’re changing our tune a little. We didn’t think the Ducks were deep enough and talented enough to win the title, and we still have our doubts about that. With doubts growing about Ohio State, though, and with doubts persisting about Texas and Georgia…maybe it’s the Ducks? They’re not horribly far behind the big teams in the talent composite. Maybe having the best quarterback in college football (we like Ward’s Heisman chances more, but Gabriel’s better and Quinn Ewers is still probably hurt) is enough to bridge the gap. Three units on the Ducks, enough to make them a profitable scenario for our portfolio.
For our next two, we’re going back to the well. We’re not confident in Alabama either, but 18-to-1 is absurd for a team Movelor and FPI both rank third in the country. They’re projecting back on the right side of the bubble, and I don’t like that LSU game, but the nice thing about our model running simulations hot is that it accounts for the reality where if Alabama is good enough to win in Baton Rouge, they’re probably good enough to compete for a national title.
Last, we’ll take Notre Dame. Again, we don’t love the Irish, but 40-to-1 is ridiculous for a team both Movelor and FPI have in the top five. (SP+ has Alabama fifth and Notre Dame seventh, if you’re wondering why we omitted SP+.) Like Oregon, we have doubts about Notre Dame keeping it up. Right now, though, they’re playing like a national title contender. As with Alabama, too: If Notre Dame’s not good enough to beat USC in Los Angeles, they’re not good enough to win it all anyway. We don’t have to worry about losing a championship-caliber team because they got tripped up by their schedule. Scenarios where they miss the playoff and scenarios where they’re secretly mediocre are highly correlated. That means there’s also some correlation between them making it and them being good.
This leaves us with Notre Dame, Clemson, Alabama, and Penn State as high-upside options, with Oregon as a low-upside option, and with Texas and Ohio State as low-downside options. The only true contender we don’t have is Georgia. We wouldn’t mind them taking an upset. If nothing else, it might open the price up on them a little bit.
Pick: Oregon to win +450. Low confidence. x3
Pick: Alabama to win +1800. Low confidence.
Pick: Notre Dame to win +4000. Low confidence.
NFC
Our NFL portfolio is slowly turning into one big fade of the 49ers and the Ravens, with the Chiefs a break-even option. We’re going to keep leaning into that not because we’re completely out on the Niners, but because we respect them. We want to build enough leverage to have some choices if the Niners meet the Lions or Eagles or Packers or Commanders in the NFC Championship. So, one unit on the Lions and two on the Eagles, whom we’d previously only bet in the Super Bowl market.
Pick: Detroit to win +310. Low confidence.
Pick: Philadelphia to win +750. Low confidence. x2
AFC
This is goofier, but FPI has the value off the charts, and we just came very close to a huge payout thanks to the Detroit Tigers. We saw Joe Flacco make the playoffs just one year ago. The Colts are only half a game out of playoff position right now, and the team they’re trailing is the Chargers.
Pick: Indianapolis to win +6000. Low confidence.
Super Bowl
Two more of our standbys. It’s worth noting here that FPI does respect the Jets.
Pick: Detroit to win +650. Low confidence.
Pick: Buffalo to win +950. Low confidence.
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How we do this, and how we’re doing:
Single-game college football bets: We’re always mediocre on these, but we’ve been awful this year. We’re 27–32–1 so far, down 7.41 units. We do use Movelor, our model’s rating system, to guide these, but we don’t always follow its lead.
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 15–10 so far, up 3.82 units. We lean on FPI 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.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,479 published bets. We weight our units by confidence: 1 unit for low confidence, 2 for medium, 3 for high. Our all-time return is very, very bad. –5.5%. Much worse than coin flip betting. Most of this is because our MLB futures portfolio just got smoked, but even before that, we were around a 2% all-time deficit. As we said above, we’re going to bet enough on election market layups to get back even all-time, but our track record on published sports bets is terrible. We can’t in good conscience recommend anybody follow our bets, even beyond the legal disclaimer piece.
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These are for entertainment purposes and are not at all investment advice. If you think you might have a gambling problem, please call 1–800–GAMBLER to learn more and/or seek help.
