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 6,267 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.3% across 2,266 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 college basketball, and we’ve got our college football futures for the day. We’ll hit our NFL futures for the week tomorrow, due to some time constraints today with Christmas travel. Here’s the context on each market.
Single-game college basketball bets: On the season, we’re 21–25. We’re down 6.03 units, and we’re 1–12 over our last thirteen. It has been going terribly.
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 about 22 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.
UConn @ Seton Hall
Xavier @ St. John’s
Villanova @ Creighton
UConn’s terrible recent record in conference openers has been making its rounds online today, but this isn’t a particularly relevant stat. They’ll get upset at points this Big East season, but we don’t see Seton Hall being the first to do it.
For Xavier and St. John’s, we don’t love how big the line has gotten but we do think the Johnnies take care of business at home. Neither has played spectacularly over nonconference play, and it’s easy to make too much of Xavier’s strong finish.
Villanova is scary, but we like the home team there as well. Creighton shouldn’t have any trouble getting up for this game, even coming off the big win over Alabama.
Pick: Parlay – UConn, St. John’s, Creighton to win (+124). Low confidence.
Rose Bowl
Our approach over these next thirteen days is to try to build a path that mostly fades Washington. In order to hit both Alabama and Michigan, we’re putting units on Alabama in the Rose Bowl, where they’re the underdog, and units on Michigan to win the national championship, where their odds are longer than those of the Tide. We’re still in an ugly spot, but we plan to spend roughly 104 units between now and the Rose Bowl’s kickoff. That includes these eight.
Pick: Alabama to win +110. Low confidence. x8
