Your weekly dose of sports betting tips and news, each Saturday at 10am Eastern.
Buffalo at Miami, NFL Week 3 – Rob Pizzola of The Hammer can’t ignore the injuries to Buffalo’s defense. Key members of the secondary in S Micah Hyde and CB Dane Jackson will not play.
Rookie CB Christian Benford and Kaiir Elam have seen the field plenty this season due to an injury to Tre’Davious White, and they will get even more snaps this week. This must have an impact against a speedy group of Dolphins receivers.
In addition, DT Ed Oliver and Jordan Phillips will also miss this game. Buffalo’s offense should score points as they usually do, and this all suggests value on the over. As of Saturday morning, FanDuel has 52.5, -115 on the over.
Rob and company do great work over at The Hammer, a new sports betting media company.
Surprising college football prediction – When I asked professional bettor Eddie Walls to make a prediction, he said he doubted whether Notre Dame would make a bowl. Even though I had the Fighting Irish were overrated at 5th in the preseason AP poll, this prediction really surprised me.
Eddie argued that Notre Dame has a great defense but almost nothing on offense. The schedule also looks tougher as a team like Syracuse no longer seems like an easy win.
Eddie brings an intimidating amount of college football knowledge to any conversation, and you can catch all of his insights on this week’s episode of The Football Analytics Show.
Injuries – Unless otherwise noted, this information is from USA Today for college football and ESPN for the NFL.
- Los Angeles Chargers QB Justin Herbert sat out practice on Friday and is questionable against Jacksonville.
- New Orleans QB Jameis Winston is again listed as questionable against Carolina, but he did play the entire game against Tampa Bay last week.
- San Francisco QB Trey Lance was placed on injured reserve because of an ankle injury. Jimmy Garoppolo will start for the Niners.
- Dallas QB Dak Prescott returned to practice on Thursday but will not play against the New York Giants on Monday night.
- Auburn QB TJ Finley has a shoulder injury and will not play against Missouri. Robby Ashford will start, but he might have started anyway as Finley got benched against Penn State last week and Zach Calzada is also injured.
- Florida State QB Jordan Travis has a leg injury and is questionable against Boston College.
- Northern Illinois QB Rocky Lombardi has a knee injury and is questionable at Kentucky.
- Purdue QB Aiden O’Connell has an unspecified injury and is a game time decision against Florida Atlantic.
James Madison at Appalachian State – Parker Fleming notes that James Madison QB Todd Centeio has been excellent this season. The transfer from Colorado State has completed 66% of his passes despite often throwing the ball deep (11.5 average depth of target).
James Madison should be able to throw the ball against an Appalachian State pass defense that has struggled this season. Parker’s numbers predict Appalachian State to win by 5.3 points, and he sees value in betting James Madison +7 in this game.
Parker puts together three college football shows per week for The Hammer that I highly recommend.
World soccer/football predictions – These predictions come from my world football/soccer rankings that take game results in international matches and adjust for opponent.
- United States vs Saudi Arabia – United States has a 55.0% chance to win. Saudi Arabia has a 17.3% chance to win. There is a 27.6% chance for a tie. The USMNT looked awful against Japan on Friday in a 2-0 loss. The competition gets easier against Saudi Arabia in Spain on Tuesday.
- England hosting Germany – England has a 55.6% chance to win. Germany has a 21.3% chance to win. There is a 23.1% chance for a tie. Both of these teams are coming off unexpected 1-0 losses, as England fell at Italy and Germany to Hungary.
- Portugal hosting Spain – Portugal has a 44.9% chance to win. Spain has a 30.1% chance to win. There is a 25.0% chance for a tie. This match on Tuesday should be excellent as Spain and Portugal rank 5th and 7th respectively in my world soccer/football rankings.
For more predictions over this international weekend, click here. I’ll have lots more predictions before the World Cup starts on November 20.
NFL play by play data – You want to dig into the NFL play by play data, but you don’t want to scrape the data yourself. That nflfastR package exists, but it’s really annoying to get started with R as a Python coder.
Dr. Ben Baldwin, author and maintainer of nflfastR, has you covered. The most recent NFL play by play is available in a csv file the morning after games. Now you can data science to your heart’s content without actually having to scrape a thing.
Chad Powers – Eli Manning wanted to know more about the walk on experience, so he made a visit to Penn State. With the help of a make up team, he became Chad Powers.
In the end, he didn’t end up making the team for two reasons. “Think fast, run fast.” But this clip from the tryout is pure hilarity.
You can catch the entire Chad Powers episode of Eli’s Places on YouTube.
Football betting with a PhD edge
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