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 –1% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 6,216 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.2% across 2,257 completed high and medium-confidence picks (low confidence picks these days are mostly in experimental markets for us).
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 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 use Movelor heavily to make college football picks. We use kenpom heavily to make college basketball picks. We use FPI heavily to make NFL futures picks, but not spreads and totals.
We’ve got a college basketball play and we’ve got our daily college football futures action. Here’s the context on each market.
Single-game college basketball bets: On the season, we’re 20–18. We’re up 0.06 units, which is technically a profit.
College football futures: We started the season with 300 units in our college football futures portfolio, with the intent being to spend 200 of those over the season’s fifteen weeks and keep 100 in reserve for hedging and arbitrage opportunities. We’re down a little more than 40 units so far, but we have upside remaining. More importantly: All of the bets we list here grade out as positive-value bets unless we explicitly mark them as a hedge. So, if you’ve been faithfully following, we’re still on track to not lose more than 25% (and we retain upside), but if you’re new, these are a good place to start.
Prairie View A&M @ Northern Iowa
We don’t love anything on tonight’s college basketball board, and we don’t even have a cohesive strategy we’re trying out which is guiding this pick, but the core idea here is this:
Prairie View was having a very good nonconference season, for a SWAC team, until two games ago. Then, they ran into a team comfortable playing fast and a team that likes annihilating teams in buy games. Now, they run into an underachieving mid-major who fits neither of those descriptions.
Pick: Prairie View A&M +14 (–115). Low confidence.
FCS National Championship
Here’s the thing with this market:
The take isn’t that high, and they have NDSU and Montana at the same odds, even though Montana’s only a one-point home favorite over NDSU this weekend *as lines open.* There’s reason to believe NDSU could close as a road favorite. Markets, in other words, believe the Bison are a little better than the Griz, but they give the two the same chance in a hypothetical game against South Dakota State. It’s narrow, and there’s something to the theory that NDSU vs. SDSU is a more known entity than Montana vs. SDSU (we saw NDSU vs. SDSU already once this year, and they have a ton of common data points throughout the MVFC), but we think this is valuable and we’re going to put six units on that value again today, hoping the line will break our way as the week goes on. We aren’t going to keep pouring money onto this, but another six units feels like our best option for today.
Pick: North Dakota State to win +500. Low confidence. x6
