The RAS college hoops service bounced back from a late November slide by posting a 22-17 record for +3.3 units in Week 4.
We're now a full month into the season and are currently 104-85-3 (55%) for +10.5 units. After a strong start, we haven't exactly been lighting the world on fire the past two to three weeks. But we still feel pretty good about where we're at, and remain confident that we are a big favorite to win moving forward.
As Phase 2 of the service winds down—we still don't have official plans for Phase 3, but we will soon!—we wanted to take the opportunity to address some of the questions we've been seeing most frequently by both paid subscribers and the social media community at large.
Is the college hoops market harder?
The market is more competitive every year, but CBB was harder in 2021-22 than previous years and we still had arguably our best season ever. The CFB market has also gotten more difficult, and we just had one of our best seasons there as well. Our team is always growing and evolving and we believe we can stay ahead—even in very competitive markets.
Keep in mind when evaluating handicappers/services that there’s very few who even attempt to beat reasonably mature market day of game lines on a consistent basis.
Full focus on CBB?
There have been some questions about whether we are fully focused on college hoops. We recently launched a props service, and have been perceived to be doing more media and promotions than in the past. These are all fair questions, but we have people in place to handle our new endeavors. We are as focused as ever on college hoops and we are in constant pursuit of finding good bets.
Too much volume?
We've had an amazing long-term edge in November and December college hoops, and we've felt we left a lot of volume on the table in recent years. First and foremost we want to maximize our edge. If you have a coin that lands your way 56%+ of the time, you want to bet on as many flips as you can.
Our originating team is as big as it's ever been, and there are more lined teams and games this year than ever before. As a result we have had more release worthy plays to consider than in the past.
High volume reduces variance. In the Discord last week, we reminded people of our disappointing 2014-15 season, which is easy to forget all these years later. But in a three-week stretch from November to December that year, we lost -17.8 units in a span of 44 releases. Some of our biggest critics no doubt wondered if we were losing our edge. But we hadn't. We just released the wrong games and had very bad variance over a small sample. This year we had almost three times as many releases in the same time frame. More volume makes us a much bigger favorite to win overall.
Even though we've performed below the high standard set in recent seasons, we believe we are at 55% and +10.5 units because of higher volume, not in spite of it. We're looking forward to the many opportunities that the rest of college hoops season will bring us. We hope you'll continue to follow us as a subscriber or as a consumer of our free picks and content.
For a full archive of all of this year’s releases, click here.