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 –0.9% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 5,170 published picks, not including pending futures, and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.9% across 1,631 completed high and medium-confidence picks (low confidence picks, these days, are 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. FanGraphs is heavily used in making MLB picks. Movelor is heavily used in making college football picks, with some references to ESPN’s FPI and SP+. FPI is heavily used in making NFL picks, especially futures.
One MLB moneyline, two MLB futures, and our college football futures for the week. Here’s the context on each market.
Single-game MLB bets: On the season, we’re 95–69–5, we’re up 17.67 units, we’re up 10% (the average line on our winners has been –110).
MLB futures: We began the season with 750 units in our MLB futures portfolio, with the intent being to spend 500 of those over the regular season and keep 250 in reserve for the postseason and/or hedging & arbitrage opportunities. This is circular, because we use FanGraphs probabilities to guide our picks, but if we use FanGraphs probabilities and include today’s plays, our mean expected return on the 750 units (based on what we’ve bet so far) is 104.28 units, or 13.9%.
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. As with the MLB futures, this is circular, but if we use Movelor probabilities and include today’s plays, our mean expected return on the 300 units (based on what we’ve bet so far) is 42.92 units, or 14.3%.
Anaheim @ Tampa Bay
The Rays have clinched a playoff spot, and they’re well aware their chances of winning the AL East are down around 1-in-8. (Notably, for regular readers, FanGraphs appears to have fully removed Wander Franco from their rest-of-season projections.) This is a bit of a longshot, but if the Rays fall behind, we don’t expect them to tax their bullpen too heavily in an attempt to come back, and with Patrick Sandoval rather steady lately and Taj Bradley scuffling a little, even by FIP, we don’t hate the Angels’ chances to put the Rays behind that 8-ball. We don’t like any of the odds on playoff contenders today. We’ll try this instead.
Pick: Anaheim to win +182. Low confidence. (Sandoval and Bradley must start.)
World Series
We’ve been eyeing the Brewers for a little while, liking their value but looking for places where it fits well in our portfolio. It fits well here in part thanks to the opportunity to grab positive value on the Phillies, who were getting close to being an unprofitable scenario for us. Our World Series portion isn’t the strongest part of our portfolio, but we do have profitable paths on seven of the nine NL Playoff contenders, plus the Astros. There’s a good chance we reach that part of October with leverage, and sometimes that’s all we can try to do.
Pick: Philadelphia to win +1500. Medium confidence.
Pick: Milwaukee to win +2200. Medium confidence.
CFP National Championship
These fall into three categories: Teams we think could win the national championship, teams we think could give us great playoff leverage, and teams we bet on to miss the playoff before Week Zero but now believe present good value here.
The last of those three categories—the bets where we’re covering for what looks like a possible mistake—are the simplest to explain. We thought there was value on Oregon and Oklahoma to miss the playoff. We now think there’s value on them to win it all. This does mean our prior bets are going poorly, and in some sense we’re selling low on those, but in a portfolio this big, it’s more about amassing value, and this puts us in a position where we have upside in either direction on both these teams, something we again don’t mind with a portfolio this large.
The first category—teams we think could win the national championship—is also pretty straightforward, though it bleeds into the second. We really think Ohio State could pull it off, and we want to grab this now because if they win in South Bend and others continue to struggle, the question on Sunday and Monday is going to be whether the Buckeyes are the best team in the country. We also believe in Penn State. We have concerns there, but they could very well be a better version of the Michigan team that’s made the playoff the last two years—built to win in the Big Ten but good enough at that to have a chance against anyone not named Georgia. The way Georgia’s playing, the odds of them reaching the national championship game are below 50%. This year’s national champion might not have to be as good as recent ones have been. Then, Washington. If anyone in the Pac-12 is capable of winning the title, it’s Washington. They’ve shown the most so far and don’t come accompanied by any heavy preseason doubts. Michael Penix Jr. should be the Heisman favorite (he and Quinn Ewers both haven’t been watched enough, but that works in different directions), and the offense as a whole has performed better than USC’s, while the defense always had less to prove. The schedule also looks good enough for these guys. Of Pac-12 contenders, they only get USC and Oregon State on the road. That’s two terribly tough road games, but it’s better than what some of the others in that league are facing.
The last one—Mississippi—is outrageous value. Think about what it means if Mississippi beats Alabama on Saturday: Either Mississippi is the best team in the SEC West or Alabama has fallen off so far that the LSU we all saw get smoked by Florida State is somehow the top team in that division. Either could be true, but the odds on this are a little too high. If a team can make the SEC Championship, they can win the national championship, and if Mississippi wins this weekend they’ll likely only need to split their games with LSU (H) and Georgia (A) to get there. We have them at 3.9% to win the SEC. That’s all it takes to make 150-to-1 to win the national championship a great asset.
Pick: Ohio State to win +1200. Low confidence.
Pick: Penn State to win +1600. Low confidence.
Pick: Penn State to win +1600. Low confidence.
Pick: Washington to win +2500. Low confidence.
Pick: Oregon to win +2800. Low confidence.
Pick: Oklahoma to win +3500. Low confidence.
Pick: Mississippi to win +15000. Low confidence.
SEC
We still like Alabama’s value, too, and with both sides of that looking valuable, what we really think is that the market is mispricing this. Might Alabama really be down? Sure. But might Georgia also be down? Might the whole SEC be down? There are so many angles from which these plays make sense. That’s what happens when odds get a little out of whack.
Pick: Alabama to win +450. Low confidence.
Big Ten
We want to keep stocking up on this one, too, partially because in the event Ohio State or Michigan goes down this weekend, the odds on this could shorten dramatically. We don’t fully trust Penn State, but we don’t have to. They’re at 4-to-1, and the simplest dichotomy (they have a 1-in-3 chance of winning the Big Ten East; the Big Ten East champion will win the Big Ten) says 2-to-1 would be the break-even point.
Pick: Penn State to win +400. Low confidence.
Big 12
We are very concerned about Kansas State, but we don’t trust Texas, and we like the Wildcats to bounce back this weekend. They played a bad game, but that doesn’t mean they’re a bad team, and it took a lot of magic from Mizzou to beat them.
Elsewhere: Am I missing something about TCU? Is Sonny Dykes in jail? Because the last I checked, they lost by three points in Week 1 to a Colorado team that nobody had any tape on and is now at only slightly longer odds to win the national championship than TCU’s at to win the Big 12. Those Colorado odds are silly, that’s free money for the books, but there’s an incongruence between saying TCU is terrible—which these odds are saying—and that Colorado is a top-25 team. Our model’s lower on Colorado than just about anyone. It should be punishing TCU the most for that loss. TCU’s 1–0 in the Big 12, it gets West Virginia, Iowa State, and BYU in its next three conference games, and it still has a pretty stinking good offense. We love this price.
Pick: Kansas State to win +900. Low confidence.
Pick: TCU to win +4000. Low confidence.
ACC
Louisville, like TCU, enjoys the advantage of having already won a conference game on the road. They also have a favorable conference schedule, as we’ve mentioned before, playing neither of Florida State and Clemson in the regular season. We don’t have to be as high on them as Movelor (it has them with the second-best chance of winning this league) to like this value.
Further north, Syracuse just tore apart a respectable Purdue team, and Garrett Shrader has been making plays. This is not the Syracuse we’ve seen of late. They have a chance, especially if the Florida State who played Saturday in Massachusetts is anything close to the median Florida State.
Pick: Louisville to win +1600. Low confidence.
Pick: Syracuse to win +3300. Low confidence.
