Friday NCAA Tourney Game Projections

It was a thrilling day one of the NCAA tournament. For those of you who dabble in sports betting, I hope you had a profitable day. We have another full day of madness, and I have modeled every game to get projected point spreads to help you beat the book.

Now you will see a few projections that run contrary to my first-round tournament preview, and there are a few reasons for this. Mainly, it is because they come from different models. While that model was a logistic regression model to forecast win probabilities, this is a result of a ridge regression model to predict point differential. In developing both models, a few different predictor variables were selected in the variable selection process based on what provided the best model fit and predictive accuracy, and that is to be expected. Additionally, any statistical model is subject to some random noise and error, so particularly in those games that are pretty close we could see some contradictory results (something to consider if looking to play any of these games). The "sportsbook spread" that you see for each game comes from ESPN Bet and is subject to change as gametime nears.

My Best Bets

• San Diego State -6.5

• Texas A&M over Nebraska

• Northwestern over FAU

• Grand Canyon +5.5

Best of luck for those of you who dabble "for entertainment purposes only" and let's have another great day of Madness!