Canzano: My Week 4 picks, thoughts, and predictions
Winners, losers... and opinions.
Several years ago, a hippo named Fiona, who lives at the Cincinnati Zoo, was asked to make a pick in the Super Bowl featuring the 49ers and Chiefs.
The hippo stood very still for a while in front of two monuments bearing the team logos. Fiona surveyed the scene. Zookeepers watched. Then, the hippo opened her mouth and vomited on the Kansas City logo.
Fiona’s only gives you winners, folks.
I spoke with Carl Click, a long-time TV news anchor in Portland, this week. Click is retired and lives in Central Oregon. For the last two years, as a fun math-related hobby, he’s tracked the performance of the national betting prognosticators who appear on a variety of media shows.
It was a fascinating talk about how well (hint: mostly awful) the “experts” on these shows perform with their sports-wagering picks. Also, about how few of them document and share their season win percentages with the public.
Click reminded me that these are people who follow sports, study the line movement, and are paid to appear on shows at FOX, ESPN, and in other places and make their weekly picks. This is their job, basically. Most of the ones Click studied in the last two seasons ended up right around 50 percent.
One expert picker on ESPN had a 39-percent win percentage.
Said Click: “39 percent?!? That’s like your-wife-is-packing-up-the-kids-and-moving-to-your-sisters numbers.”
It’s a reminder that you should never wager money you can’t afford to lose. Also, listening to the “experts” is interesting, but you should ultimately make your picks. You might be just as successful.
I went 5-5 against the spread with my Week 3 picks. A hippo at the zoo could have given you about the same outcome vs. the spread as I did. I had a 9-1 record picking the games straight up.
My 2024 record vs. the spread: 24-12 (.667)
My record straight up: 34-2 (.944)
My Week 4 picks, thoughts, and predictions…