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 6,217 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. Our NFL futures are being pushed back to tomorrow this week. Here’s the context on each market.
Single-game college basketball bets: On the season, we’re 20–19. We’re down 0.94 units, which is no longer profitable.
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.
Arkansas State @ Louisville
We’ve been getting wrecked on college basketball plays, so we’re going to do one of the stupidest things in the world and bet on Louisville against a respectable Sun Belt opponent. Why? Well, our theory here is that systems like kenpom have a solid bead on what Louisville’s been, and that today’s Koron Davis distraction is less distracting to Louisville’s program than bettors think, because at this point Louisville is used to total chaos. Again, this seems stupid of us, but it’s a thin slate, alright? Let us live. This is supposed to be fun.
Pick: Louisville –3.5 (–110). Low confidence.
North Dakota State @ Montana (Hedge)
As we guessed it might, an FCS line has shifted, and that gives us a door through to which to hedge on Montana. We have a lot of upside on North Dakota State to win it all, and we have corresponding downside on Montana and South Dakota State (and Albany), and this wipes out most of our liability while preserving the original NDSU upside. It also creates an extremely narrow scenario in which if NDSU wins by exactly one point, we get five and a half free units while our NDSU futures grow even greater leverage.
Pick: Montana +1 (–110). Low confidence. x6
