Point Blank – July 24
NCAA 2015 - Going Back to School…Tyson Ross was real good on Thursday, only the result was bad…A night to be Brave, in St. Louis…
While the daily MLB boards remain a profitable grind through the next nine weeks, often providing bigger edges as the markets focus more on football and miss some of the emerging subtleties, many of you are going to turn your focus to football. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and if you want to be on top of the 2015 lined NCAA teams, your work has likely already begun. Mine certainly has. One of the keys is two-fold – to not just get the best information possible, but to also manage time wisely by being able to sort through that information with ease. Today’s focus will help you to do that.
Once upon a time prep for football season meant a trip to a store to load up on the pre-season magazines. These days there is better and fresher information on-line, and it is better to start there. But for those of you that still like to be able to get away from the computer screen, especially for outdoor summer hammock reading, there is one source that you should be looking to each season – the good folks at Lindy’s. You should consider the 2015 Football Set, which comes in a slipcase for easy storage. I keep a rotating set of five seasons of them on a shelf, so that it is easy to look up the pedigree of any player back to the season he came on board. Unfortunately there is not a separate edition for every conference on the board, but for those that are included the team previews are the best that you will find (the set also brings their NFL edition). Here is the key – the previews are written by those that have access to the team, and have followed spring practice closely, which is far different from someone sitting in a desk thousands of miles away only looking at box scores and depth charts.
A quick blind draw this morning pulled out the SEC edition, and another shuffle opened the page to Auburn. In the preview of the Tigers there are quotes from several different players talking about the adjustments to Will Muschamp’s defense in spring practice. That is valuable stuff. And even for the conferences that do not get their own edition, the National Preview magazine still brings some quality coverage of each team.
OK, where to go on-line? Start with the guys who have been at this a long time, our friends at The Gold Sheet. Their college previews are up for free now, and are important because they are among the only ones specifically written with pointspreads in mind. And two quality on-line preview sites are College Football News (make sure you return there to read Pete Fiutak’s weekly column in the fall), and Campus Insiders. Both of those sites bring useful information on each team, and are written well enough that they are easy to absorb. It is the kind of reading you can be doing between innings, or during pitching changes, this weekend.
Next week the focus will turn to some key NFL target areas as training camps open, but for now let’s get back to the bases…
About Last Night…
Backing Tyson Ross and the Padres provided a clunker of a ticket last night, but not necessarily because of bad reasoning. Ross’s stuff was terrific, with eight strikeouts, no walks and an 81.3 GB%, translating to a single-game FIP of 0.24, far off of what ERA will record at 4.76. He is absolutely someone to keep an eye on in the weeks ahead; his season-long FIP rates him as the #13 pitcher in the Majors, but the 6-8/3.45 that will show in the pitching forms will keep a lot of folks from being interested.
In the Sights…
I am not sure that I am grasping the intense market interest in St. Louis this morning, with the Cardinals soaring all the way to -190 as I write this. That opens up a nice value opportunity to back #957 Atlanta Run Line, which can be had for as low as -125 in the current trading. In this case “The Chart” works for us, because the difference between St. Louis winning, and winning big, goes far beyond the standard adjustment.
It can be understood that many want to back the Cardinals at home, where they are now 34-12 this season, but note that with a -1.5 attached that falls all the way down to 18-28, with nearly half of those wins coming by a single tally. Now an offense that has only recorded a .230/.310/.347 against left-handers, for an OPS of .657 that rates #27, should not be expected to do much on the first look against Manuel Banuelos and a rested Atlanta bullpen, and for tonight the St. Louis pitching is not all that daunting – despite shutting out the hapless Mets in his last start Tim Cooney actually labored to an 18.0 PPI, and do not expect closer Trevor Rosenthal to be available, after working three straight nights, to the tune of 53 pitches.
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