MACtion has arrived. Thankfully, it usually smokes us.
Let’s pick a loser.
Miami (OH) @ Ball State
We can’t get a read on Bowling Green/Central Michigan, with Central Michigan down to its third-string quarterback but both those teams almost exactly on top of their preseason Movelor number. Instead, we’ll go to Muncie, where Movelor has the line at 11.6. What makes us lean towards Miami here is that they’ve played better lately, Ball State has underperformed its preseason expectations, and SP+ and FPI both lean slightly towards the RedHawks as well. As we said, MACtion usually smokes us.
Pick: Miami (OH) –11.5 (–110). Low confidence.
Idaho State @ Arizona State
On the court, we’re pivoting from spreads to overs, at least for tonight. Overs dominated last night, and overs dominated last year, and of all the games tonight, we like this one because we could see Arizona State having some collateral doubt attached to it thanks to what Duke did in that exhibition game. Not a lot of logic here, but it’s something.
Pick: Over 144 (–110). 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 29–38–1 so far, down 11.63 units. We do use Movelor, our model’s rating system, to guide these, but we don’t always follow its lead.
Single-game college basketball bets: These have been a rollercoaster for us historically, but on the aggregate, results have been negative. This year, we’re betting one or two games a day, at least to start. We may taper that off. We use kenpom heavily. We’re 0–1 on the season.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,491 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%. 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. This will change soon, because of the election bets, but our sports track record stinks, and it’s necessitated yesterday’s election bet gimmick, a get-out-of-jail-free card from dumb betting markets which is very difficult to replicate in the real world with any reasonably sized unit.
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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.
