NCAA Pick of the Day 01/09/25 (107-78): Stony Brook +6.5 -110

Never miss a pick! Sign up for the POTD email on the home page!

Analysis:

Another home dog, this time set in coastal Long Island, New York - just a mile from the beach - as the Seawolves welcome in the Drexel Dragons. And, no, I did not choose the matchup just for the opportunity to make the graphic. I'm not even sure why a Strong Island team opted for a mascot native to the Pacific Northwest, but I digress.

We have started discussing the behavior of college basketball projection models with some regularity in these write ups over the past couple of weeks, and today we have another 101-style instance. When teams are expected to be near even-pegging, the majority of college basketball models award the home team a three point advantage on the spread line...

So, if you were to, let's say, scroll down and look at the SQ Projection for this game, you would see a near three point projected win for Stony Brook... who is a 6.5 point underdog at the time of publication. That's because SQ basically has these teams dead even, and we're staking our claim, tonight, that the market is wrong on Drexel because the Dragons' results aren't telling the whole truth.

Drexel has had six games that they've won that SQ expected them to lose. For fairness, they did have two games they lost that SQ expected them to win, but that's still a net of four unexpected wins by discrete expectations. Factoring win probability correctly, Drexel is likely a 6-8 team masking as an 8-6 team, which puts them in the top 20%ILE in luck. They were even expected to lose their most recent contest to NCA&T, so there's some fresh recency bias hot out the oven for us.

The drastic expected game performance comes from the Dragons ranking 282nd in turnover rate and 355th in free throw rate offensively, while forcing turnovers on defense at the 345th best rate... possessions matter, maybe more than any other single aspect... and this Drexel team does not get enough of them. Nobody's noticing it yet because they're getting insanely lucky on defense and teams are expected to be scoring 1.09 PPP on them but are only putting up 1.02. That is a near 7% increase in expected scoring. So an extra 3.5 points per every 50 possessions allowed. That changes games, shifts expectations and confuses models that only look at results.

We do not look at results to quantify a team's strength, here at SQB - we only use results to discern opportunities where our understand of a team differs than what people might be seeing on the floor.

This is one of those times. The model has Stony Brook to win outright, I support it, because theres almost equal good luck on our side, too. I'll take a bit of action on the ML alongside my spread bet, but the play is on the generous +6.5 spread on the home Seawolves as they look to expose the Dragons.

SQ's Projection: STON 71 - DREX 69 Visit the Matchup Simulator with any membership to view all projections from the model!

Get 15% OFF your first purchase with Code: "POTD" !!

Watch Tonight's Game with ShotQuality Live FOR FREE - SQLive is the only live regression data software with up-to-the-minute expected scores!

Get all 5500+ College Basketball games with SQLive, plus NBA and WNBA games included only with Premium Yearly Membership!

& make sure to watch BetCast to see SQLive in action and learn more about ShotQualityBets!