Maddux Sports Blog

We are still several months away from the start of the NFL season, and there is a whole lot of quality sporting action between now and then. For a huge number of sports bettors, though, the NFL is the only thing that really matters. If the players aren’t currently dancing with other stars then they are in the weight room and on the practice field getting ready for next season. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t be doing the same. Don’t worry - you don’t have to break a sweat to get ready. Here are five things you can do to get ready to be at your best and most profitable when the season starts for real, though:

Catch up on player movement - It’s easy to keep track of the high profile players and their new addresses. Football is the ultimate team sport, though, so it’s more than just the stars that impact how a team will perform. Now is a great time to study the depth chart of teams and how they have changed since last we saw them. The rosters aren’t cast in stone yet, obviously, but studying now can give you a good sense of which teams have truly improved and which still have work to do. The media will spend lots of time between now and then talking about the same thing, but they will focus on the stars and rarely delve into what really matters. You’ll have an edge on the public if you work hard to form your own opinion.

Do your reading - There are hundreds of websites devoted to handicapping, dozens of forums filled with good information, and a small library of worthwhile football books as well. The more you read and learn, the better you will be as a handicapper. You won’t agree with everything you read, and you might not even change what you do, but you’ll learn to avoid mistakes or do things differently. Instead of rading a John Grisham on the beach, read something that will make you some money down the line.

Improve your record-keeping - Most bettors don’t keep very good records. They probably know if they win or lose, but they can’t necessarily tell you how they do it. Spending the time setting up a better, more comprehensive record-keeping system is perhaps the biggest single thing you can do to help you make more money. If you closely track your bets you can find the leaks - the bets that you consistently make that aren’t profitable. You probably have bad habits that you aren’t even aware of - maybe you play the over more than you should, or you think that the Bears are better than they are. You can only fix the problems when you first identify them. Spend some time making friends with Excel this summer.

Plunge into the stats - You probably spend a lot of time looking at stats during the season, but there are also a lot of stats that you probably ignore. You should spend the time now getting familiar with some stats that you don’t use in your handicapping now. Look at individual boxscores, find a stat that sticks out as being particularly good or bad, and see how the game turned out. Then look at other games to see if the same stat had the same impact. If you do start to see a trend then you can look deeper. If not then move on to the next one. You might just find another way to find and edge in a game or two over the season.

Get to know the rookies - New players are on their way, and many of them will be making a serious impact. The media has been talking about them since long before the draft. They certainly don’t plunge very deep into reality when they do it, though. If you want to really form valuable opinions about the new players you need to ignore all that you have heard and form your own ideas. Read articles from the local papers in the towns the player’s schools were located in. Look for scouting reports from real draft analysis sites that do their own research. Go to Youtube and find highlights packages to see the players first hand. Maybe you’ll spot something that you really like about a player, or something you really don’t. There is no such thing as too much knowledge.

I’m going to weigh in tomorrow with in-game analysis during both games. Until then, I just wanted to share a couple of interesting things that have popped up today and provide us with more to think about as we try to make winning picks on the big games:

Kansas loses a player - The Jayhawks become the second team to have to cope with the loss of a minute-eating reserve. Unlike Memphis, though, this was not for disciplinary reasons. In a bizarre incident, guard Rodrick Stewart broke his kneecap in an open practice today. He was mugging for the crowd by doing a big slam and he obviously landed very badly. Stewart, a senior, added just 2.8 points per game, but was good for 11.6 minutes. Like the Allen situation with Memphis situation, I’m not too worried about this one - teams are very likely to shorten their bench and rely more heavily on their starters in a game that is so crucial as this. That’s especially the case when the season ends with a loss, and is almost over with a win, so there is no future to save your players for.

The ‘experts’ weigh in - It is time for the paid geniuses to make their wise picks. There is an interesting contrast between two of the major media outlets. SI.com asked five of their writers who would win. Four came up with UCLA as champions, with three having them beat North Carolina in the final. The fourth has North Carolina beating Memphis. ESPN is a bit different. Three of their five experts has Memphis beating UCLA, though none have Memphis winning it all. Two of them have Kansas winning it all, while UCLA and North Carolina get the nod once. The boldest pick is that he team that is playing best in the final will win it. That’s how you really go out on a limb. If you buy into these expert opinions at all then you have to think that UCLA presents pretty good value in their Saturday game since they are underdogs. The SI writers might want to make a futures bet, too - the Bruins are the longest shots on the board to win it all at 16/5 according to Bodog. Kansas is 3/1, Memphis is 27/10, and North Carolina is fairly significantly favored at 8/5.

The books like their number in the North Carolina game - Almost 80 percent of the bets made so far have been on the Tar Heels, yet the number is still at the -3 that it opened at in most places. That either means that the smart money is hitting Kansas hard enough to balance things out, or that the books are willing to expose themselves at this number. Memphis has had about two thirds of the action, and the line has moved from -1 to -2, so that one is acting more as expected.

I was sitting down to take my first long look at the Final Four today when, as I often do, I started to think about whether there were overriding rules that should be followed when handicapping college basketball’s last three games of the year. I tend to do this kind of thing whenever I am faced with an annual event. It’s not because I am looking for a system or a shortcut - those don’t exist, or at least not without a ridiculous amount of research and study to uncover them. Instead, I do it because it helps me to focus better on the games at hand, and to prioritize the ridiculous amount of information that I will be faced with. If you don’t have some kind of a framework to build upon when you look at a wildly public game like these three will be then you are vulnerable to being led astray by the ‘experts’ and whatever topics they happen to be focused on these days. In the last two rounds, for example, it would have been pretty easy to discount Memphis because we heard endlessly how badly they shot fouls and how much that matters. As it turns out they shot very well from the line, and they would have won both games fairly handily even if they had been much, much worse.

As I looked at these games, these are the four basic rules that I came up with to shape my further analysis. I’m not suggesting that these are definitive by any means, but they will definitely define and containing both the starting points of my handicapping and the places where I spend the most time:

1. The better team wins - This may seem obvious, but it bears saying anyway. This is not the time to question which team is more motivated or anything else. Every team has been focusing on this all year, and they will be at their best. We see lots of upsets every year leading up to this point, but we don’t usually see them past here. The job, then, is not too get too fancy or too cute with th whole thing, but rather to figure out which teams are better and to back those.

2. Ignore the spread - Obviously this only holds up to a point - it would be stupid to make a bet without looking at the spread. What I mean, though, is that I will be ignoring the spread until I have evaluated both teams completely. I have glanced at the odds to check for irregularities or rapid shifts, but I haven’t really internalized them because I think it is more important here than usual to have a sense of how I see thing splaying out before I see what the oddsmakers have to say. With the public attention being so intense for these games, and with very public teams being involved, I don’t want to be in a position to be influenced by the spread as I make my decision because I have very little faith that the spread is particularly meaningful in this game.

3. It’s about stars, not depth - The bench players and the lesser starters figure into these games, but the best players tend to shine through on these stages. Florida didn’t beat Ohio State last year because they had a stronger bench. They won because their lottery picks outplayed Ohio State’s lottery picks, and because they had more draftable, star caliber players on the roster. It is no coincidence that all of the remaining teams are packed with future NBA players while teams like Tennessee and Xavier that don’t have the blue chip talent are watching the games at home. My focus, then, will be on deciding which of these ridiculously talented players have the best opportunity to shine in the brightest of spotlights.

4. Coaching matters, but it is not a relevant differentiator here - Perhaps nothing affects a college team as much as how well it is coached. It is no fluke that teams regularly experience rapid turnovers when they dramatically upgrade their coach. I don’t think that there is any merit, though, in trying to compare the remaining coaches. You don’t make this level by a fluke, and each of these coaches is among a fairly small handful of the best coaches in the country. Each has had a stellar career, and has shown again and again that they are worthy of their reputations and huge paychecks. I personally love John Calipari and think that he is a master of setting up a challenging system and recruiting to it. That doesn’t mean, though, that I can rationally say that he is better than Ben Howland - a guy in his third straight Final Four - or Roy Williams and his national title. Bill Self might have the least impressive record of the four, but he has led his third team to at least the Elite Eight and he is a proven winner. I think that it is a real mistake to do anything other than to consider the coaches a total wash and ignore them - any advantage you assign to one over another is much more due to personal bias than to a real advantage.