For those who missed it yesterday, we’re changing our approach to these published bets. Here’s an explanation, along with our pick for Ohio State vs. Texas.
Two follow-ups from yesterday:
First, we’re not adding anything on Ohio State. We won that Notre Dame bet, and that leaves us comfortable with our smaller bet on the Buckeyes. We’ve profited on the semifinals and we have more upside out there. We like that setup.
Second, we’ll publish tomorrow’s college basketball play tomorrow. We’d left it up in the air whether we’d publish any bets tomorrow or not. This week, we’ll be publishing some bets on Saturday. It’s possible there’ll be more than just the basketball play, but I don’t anticipate that right now.
Moving on to the Wild Card Weekend picks:
NFL Wild Card Round
This fall, we used FPI to bet a few NFL spreads per week, generally the night games. It went really well. The sample was small enough and the profit was small enough that this isn’t definitive proof of the soundness of the strategy, and even if it was, markets adapt and the playoffs are different from the regular season. Still, we found something that worked for 18 weeks, and we aren’t going to go away from it.
We are going to limit our unit here, especially since we’re betting all six games. We made our college football units 5.0% and 2.5% of our original bankroll. We made our college basketball moneyline favorite unit a 4.0% number. These will be 2.0% each. To reflect some hesitancy over the approach.
Also, where applicable, we’re using 2.0 points to represent home-field advantage. We don’t know what the best number is in the NFL, and we don’t know if it gets better or worse in the playoffs, but that’s the default we landed on after a small amount of research back in September.
Pick: Texans +3 (–115). 20.00 units to win 17.39.
Pick: Ravens –9 (–110). 20.00 units to win 18.18.
Pick: Broncos +9 (–115). 20.00 units to win 17.39.
Pick: Packers +5 (–110). 20.00 units to win 18.18.
Pick: Buccaneers –3 (–105). 20.00 units to win 19.05.
Pick: Rams +2.5 (–101). 20.00 units to win 19.80.
College Basketball
On the college basketball side, we don’t like either option tonight in the Big Ten. We don’t trust Maryland, we’re wary of UCLA figuring some things out, and we don’t know what to make of Minnesota’s chaotic game against Ohio State on Monday.
That brings us to the MAC, where home-court advantage is not very big and we’re wary of a team—Toledo—who’s trying to stay unbeaten early in conference play, especially against a winless foe. Still, we have some degree of trust in the Rocket program, and CMU’s nonconference performance was all-over-the-place enough to make this the closest thing to a good option in our eyes.
Pick: Toledo to win (–245). 40.00 units to win 17.78.
**
We’ll get a full tracker into a Google Sheet soon, but…
2025: +51.16 units (started with 1,000-unit bankroll)
2025: 57% average ROI (weighted by unit; sample size: 2 picks)
Pre-2025: 0% average ROI (worse when limited to only sports)
Units taken from best odds we can find at major sportsbooks available to most Americans.
