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College football player prop – Washington WR Jalen McMillan has had a rough season, as he missed the middle part of the season with an injury. However, he has seen an increasing number of snaps and targets in Washington’s last three games.
Against Oregon in the Pac-12 championship game, McMillan had 9 catches for 131 yards against a solid defense. He easily got open for a conversion on 3rd and 4 to seal the game.
McMillan and Rome Odunze tend to see the same volume of targets when both are healthy. While Odunze has a receiving yards prop of 97.5, McMillan is at 72.5 at DraftKings. There is value in Jalen McMillan over 72.5 receiving yards.
NFL longest reception prop – On the Forward Progress podcast, Jack Miller of Establish the Run talked about New Orleans WR Rashid Shaheed against Tampa Bay.
Establish the Run is known for their quantitative models for player props. When Jack talked about how Shaheed had a higher target share at 22.5% last week, this no doubt affects their prediction against Tampa Bay. The same applies to Tampa Bay’s defensive rank of 17th in yards per pass attempt.
The Establish the Run model puts Shaheed’s longest reception in the 19 to 20 range. On the podcast, Jack discussed longest reception over 16.5 yards, as the lightning quick Shaheed has gone over this number in 7 of 13 games.
The market has moved to 17.5, but the Establish the Run model still suggests value in over on Shaheed’s longest reception.
College basketball predictions – These predictions are based on my college basketball model that tends to react quickly to teams, similar to my college football model.
- Marquette will beat Creighton by 0.6 points at home. Marquette guard Tyler Kolek is shooting the ball even better than last season. Creighton lost to Villanova in overtime this week but still rates as the better team by my numbers.
- Kansas will beat Wichita State by 14.2 points (neutral site). Kansas brought in big Hunter Dickinson but lost wings Jalen Wilson and Grady Dick to the NBA. Despite being preseason number one and a 10-1 record against Division 1 opponents, Kansas has not impressed the algorithms. My team rankings that take margin of victory and adjust for schedule rank Kansas 17th.
All predictions are available to members of The Power Rank the day before the game.
Same game parlays – These seem like sucker bets, the kind that only novices bet. You know the sports book puts a big hold, and hence these bets are not profitable.
Ed Miller and Matthew Davidow, authors of the new book Interception – The Secrets of Modern Sports Betting, disagree. They note that the SGP started with soccer and tennis, the primary sports bet in Europe. Getting the prices for an SGP right for football is much harder.
As an example, consider the NFL running back that a team uses near the goal to score a touchdown. A general model might get the correlation between under 2.5 carries and a touchdown wrong for this kind of specialist.
This is the type edge case that Miller and Davidow suggest can be exploited to get an edge with SGPs.
NFL humor – How do you give the Raiders 2 touchdowns in 7 seconds? …you bundle them. Loved this post of the Chiefs Reddit site.
Smarter sports betting in less than 5 minutes
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