Editor’s Note: For three years now, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. Overall, the results have been positive, 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 1,928 published picks, not including bets that remain pending, like futures. 0.9% doesn’t sound amazing, but relative to what else you get on the internet?
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 have a gambling problem, get help.
Lines for these come from the Vegas consensus or the closest approximation available at the time picks are written, unless otherwise noted. KenPom is heavily used in making college basketball picks. ESPN’s SP+ is heavily used in making college football picks of all kinds, and FPI is used in making conference championship futures picks.
We’ll start with bowls, then throw in our college basketball pick for tonight.
Pinstripe Bowl: Maryland vs. Virginia Tech
We’re having a terrible bowl season, going 5-15-2 so far in FBS bowl games.
It’s hard to say with confidence exactly what’s happened, but given our strategy has been to pick the team whose head coach has the better record in bowls (with the edge given to full-time coaches in the cases in which an interim is facing a full-time coach and neither has coached a bowl before), one guess we have is that the market was thinking like us and overvalued this factor. Again, we’re not saying this with confidence, but with fifteen true bowls remaining (we treat CFP and FCS games differently), it’s worth a shot. Both Mike Locksley and J.C. Price are coaching their first ever bowl game this afternoon. Price, an intern, gets the edge from us.
Pick: Virginia Tech +4 (-105). Low confidence.
Cheez-It Bowl: Iowa State vs. Clemson
Another thing we debated was whether or not to include national championships and national semifinals as bowls in our count. So far, we’ve included it where applicable (I think Gus Malzahn is the only one to whom this applies, since Chip Kelly’s game was canceled), so we’ll continue to include it, especially since if you take away Swinney’s College Football Playoff results, he’s 4-3 all-time in bowls, just like Matt Campbell, leaving us in need of a tiebreaker.
Pick: Iowa State +1.5 (-110). Low confidence.
Alamo Bowl: Oregon vs. Oklahoma
This isn’t Bryan McClendon’s first bowl as a head coach—his only other game as a head coach came in the 2015-16 TaxSlayer Bowl, which Georgia won under his leadership. Bob Stoops, across the field, is 9-9 all-time in bowl games, 8-6 when they aren’t the national championship.
Pick: Oklahoma -7 (-110). Low confidence.
***
Nevada @ Kansas
I’m not sure what effect, if any, this game being played on short notice has on these odds, but the fact that totals are generally rather true in early-season tournaments makes me doubt the effect on the game itself is significant. The basics here are that you have two offense-first, fast-tempo teams playing one another, and Kansas, the better of the two, doesn’t play this weekend, lessening their incentive to rest their guys.
Pick: Over 154.5 (-110). Medium confidence.
