Your weekly dose of sports betting tips, analytics and humor, every Saturday at 10am Eastern.
NFL Coach of the Year – On an episode of the Move the Line podcast, Ryan Noonan and SharpClarke made the case for Miami coach Mike McDaniel as Coach of the Year.
The markets have Miami at +290 to win the AFC East. If the Dolphins win, McDaniel will firmly be in the mix to win the award and generate a much bigger payout. In addition, the defense should also improve because of roster upgrades and new DC Vic Fangio.
While the bet was released at +2200 for McDaniel as NFL Coach of the Year, there is still value at the current +2000.
San Diego Padres – On the VSIN Daily Baseball Bets podcast this past Thursday, Adam Burke noted that San Diego has been awful at clutch hitting. Through Wednesday, the Padres had hit .199 with runners in scoring position.
Of course, the Padres break out with 10 runs Thursday against the Giants and 13 runs Friday against Washington. Adam recommended betting the Padres at +155 to make the playoffs at DraftKings, and this has already moved to +125.
San Diego has scored 4.37 runs per game, but it should be higher given their overall poor clutch hitting. In addition, they face Josiah Gray of Washington on Saturday, and ZiPS projects him with a 4.88 FIP (fielding independent pitching) the rest of the season, a half run worse than MLB average.
This suggests value in San Diego over 4.5 runs (-128 at FanDuel).
Baker Mayfield – Once the top pick in the NFL draft, Mayfield struggled in 2022. With Carolina, he had a 31.4% passing success rate, a crucial NFL offensive metric. This success rate was awful compared to the 42.8% NFL average.
After being released by Carolina, Mayfield was picked up by the Los Angeles Rams. His passing success rate improved to 38.6% in five games.
However, schedule adjustments suggest Mayfield wasn’t much better with the Rams. There are two reasons:
- A 41.2% passing success rate against Las Vegas, the second worst pass defense by my numbers.
- A 67.9% passing success rate against Denver, a solid defense. However, my algorithm tends to give a QB less credit for an outlier performance like this.
After adjustments, Mayfield’s performance with the Rams predicts a 33.5% passing success rate against an average NFL defense, not much better than the 32.2% from his time with Carolina.
Members of The Power Rank have access to adjusted passing success rates based on QB, a crucial part of my NFL predictions.
Data science boot camp – Nick Wan, the Director of Analytics for the Cincinnati Reds, is holding a data science boot camp. He wants to take you from working in spreadsheets to a machine learning model in Python.
Nick will teach 8 sessions of this bootcamp for free. If you’re looking to get into data science, don’t miss this amazing opportunity.
Betting humor – Hilarious even before the friend that doesn’t bet screws up the math at the end.
$100M is no big deal in the age in the severe limits era sports books.
Smarter sports betting in less than 5 minutes
These nuggets were sent to The Power Rank’s email newsletter. This is a free service that strives to be:
- Valuable
- Concise
- Entertaining
While NFL and college football are the main focus, 5-Nuggets will continue to curate bets from the sharpest minds in the business all off season.
To get this free service delivered straight into your inbox, enter your best email address and click on “Sign up now!”
Leave a Reply