Your weekly dose of sports betting tips, analytics and humor, every Saturday at 10am Eastern.
First CB in the NFL draft – Benjamin Solak of The Ringer joined the Deep Dive podcast to talk about the NFL draft and cornerbacks.
Oregon’s Christian Gonzalez is the favorite as the first CB taken, as he checks every box. However, Solek notes that some teams will have Devon Witherspoon ahead of him. The exceptional film on the Illinois star makes up for concerns about his size.
While the market has moved already, Solek suggested value in betting Witherspoon at +300 as the first CB taken (FanDuel).
College basketball injuries – Evan Miya’s COVID baby was college basketball analyitcs. Based on his Ph.D. in Statistics, he developed a Bayesian approach to evaluating players both on offense and defense. The result is an adjusted plus minus for college basketball players.
On a recent episode of The Football Analytics Show, Evan talked about UCLA’s Jaylen Clark, the third best defensive player in the nation by his metrics. The season ending achilles injury to Clark drops UCLA from 5th to 7th in his team rankings.
UCLA hosted Arizona recently and closed as a 5.5 point favorite with Clark. With three points of home court, this implies UCLA was 2.5 point better.
These two teams play again in the Pac-12 tournament tonight at a neutral site. As of Saturday morning, Circa and Bookmaker have their rematch as a pick, which suggests Clark is worth about 2.5 points.
Do you make this mistake in your bracket? – Since you get this email and have read this far, you’re going to use analytics to fill out your bracket. But will you use it in every game?
An episode of my podcast gets into the cognitive science behind why you might not. The ideas apply not only to your bracket but also that list of bets you get from a long time winner.
Desmond Bane assists prop – The third year pro for the Memphis Grizzlies is having his best season, averaging a career high 21.2 points per game. However, Betscope notes some value on his assists prop against Dallas tonight (6pm Eastern tip off).
Sports books are split between 4.5 and 5.5 assists for Bane while he has averaged 4.1 assists this season. DARKO, probably the best NBA player projection system out there, also projects 4.1 assists moving forward. This suggests value on under 5.5 assists, and FanDuel has the best price (-146).
The mythical 12 seed – Last weekend, Andy Molitor of Betspurts poked fun of the public.
This is data from NCAA tournaments since 1985:
- 10 over 7 seed: 40.9%
- 11 over 6 seed: 36.7%
- 12 over 5 seed: 34.3%
- 13 over 4 seed: 21.9%
There is nothing special about a 12 seed.
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