Fade Clay Travis: A Daily Gopher Betting Series

Oh, hi, everyone. Long time no blog. I’m back to tell you about a little venture I’m doing during this year’s college football season. You might not want to read all the words below (though I hope you will!), so the TL: DR is that I am banking the premise that Clay Travis is bad at gambling picks, along with basically every other opinion, and a good strategy might be to simply fade his picks all season. Any money that would result from this strategy will go to a charitable cause. Along the way, I am going to be publicly learning about gambling and writing down those findings each week.

It is Monday, August 26th, and I am sitting down in my living room to watch the highlights of the Florida State-Georgia Tech football game, played for reasons entirely unclear in Ireland. Because I am too lazy to plug my computer into my television, I watch the highlights on YouTube’s AndroidTV app. How am I a blogger blessed with such wealth and riches? YouTube places three ad breaks throughout the eight minutes and seven seconds of video. Every ad, bar one for a man offering to buy my house sight unseen, is for some sports gambling website.

I suspect that no one reading this post finds that odd. Betting lines are everywhere. My sense is if you are foolishly reading our dear site without an ad blocker, there will be at least one to three sports betting ads alongside “sponsored content” about celebrities in bikinis at the beach, “magical” medical cures, and neurologists being amazed by barefoot running shoes. The odds run along tickers and on heads-up displays during games. I have the ability to bet on just about anything, including, most recently, the outcome of Little League World Series games. In Illinois, where I now reside, a large man named Derek Stevens dressed in the worst checkered sports coat anyone has ever willingly paid for hawks the benefit of Circa sports with “what gamblers want.” As far as I can tell, gamblers want to lose money at any time of night as fast and efficiently as possible.

I am fascinated by the explosion of sports betting in the United States. Partially because I rationally know that I am the sucker. I do not spend hours watching college football games while also building models and spending cloud computing credits crunching whether wind speeds materially affect how a Big Ten ref calls holding and whether such a finding is worth adding to my prediction of the number of points scored by the end of the third quarter.

I read the papers. Like the paper that finds that $1 of sports betting reduces net investment by over $2. Or the paper that since sports betting was legalized, overall financial health among consumers has decreased while overall debt levels have risen, particularly among young men. Partially, it’s because I do not understand gambling. I do not enjoy reading money lines or delving into injury reports. Matthew Berry viscerally repels me whenever he shows up on television. I find the Action Network deeply dull. This season, I want to dive in a bit deeper to find out why sports gambling is now a $10bn industry. The best way to do that, I imagine, is to go gambling. It would be like Nickel and Dimed, except with the real possibility of ending up with no nickels or dimes.

After all, like every good sucker, I think I am pretty smart! I have watched college sports my entire life, have a relatively deep understanding of the underlying modeling approaches, and have written about college sports online for a decade (which makes me bloody ancient in the blogosphere). If I set my mind to it, could I make money in sports gambling. Could I avoid being the sucker that all of these sportsbooks are looking so hard that they are willing to give me $200, $500, $2000 if I just lay down some bets. Therein lies the rub. My self-doubt makes me a lousy gambler, so I need an avatar who probably should have substantially more self-doubt.

Fortunately, there is such a person. I am confident that Clay Travis thinks he is smarter no matter how smart I am. That is, of course, when he is not firing off ludicrous takes for clicks because the clicks are oxygen to someone whose net worth is tied into the worst person you know loving him, and the rest of us hate reading or being alerted to him via slack channels (thanks gopherguy05!). Travis loves “checking [the lines] multiple times a day as kickoff nears to see how they might be moving” because the money lines are “like a stock market for sports,” which makes sense because he is a dumb person’s idea of Jim Kramer.

While I do find Travis obnoxious, awful, and a boil on America’s public space worse than a colony of fire ants dropping from the sky during a picnic, there’s one thing that I genuinely love about him. He’s bad at gambling.** Some dude named Cole has wasted their life doing hero’s work to answer a question that no one really wanted to know the answer to until I did two weeks ago: “What’s Clay Travis’s overall gambling results?” Dear reader, Clay Travis has a negative profit margin and an overall success rate of ~50%. What better way to learn about sports gambling than bringing back a series that Eleven Warriors did almost a decade ago?

Here are the rules.

1. Clay Travis releases picks every week. I’ll take the opposite of his bet.
2. My opinions about whether Clay is right or wrong about any pick are irrelevant. The opposite side is mechanical.
3. Each week, I will report on the progress of this experiment.
4. If this strategy were to make money, that money would go to a charitable cause.

In addition to updating progress each week, I’ll explore different aspects of sports gambling, how it works, how and who it helps, and harms. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride with me.

**I suppose this deserves an asterisk. It is possible that Travis’s picks on the web do not reflect his personal positions.