When I was a kid, I was a really good procrastinator. When it came to homework, term papers, exams…anything I had no interest in, really…I would inevitably wait until the last second to complete it. Why would I wait? Because I liked playing with my friends, and video games, and the Bill Parcells-led mid-90’s Patriots more than all of my schoolwork. Sometimes, this procrastination would just resolve itself in me cramming the night before a test, or staying up all night writing a 10-page essay. In 7th grade, on three different instances, I forgot to do my Spanish homework (basically just some fill-in-the-blank questions in a workbook), asked to go to the bathroom, put the workbook pages in my pocket, did the homework in the bathroom, and brought it back in. My teacher, Mrs. Argueta, on the third time, finally reprimanded me and figured out what was happening. We all had a Spanish name in the class, and there was no equivalent of “Ken” in Spanish, so I chose Carlos. “Carlos, I know what you’re doing,” she said. Nothing really ended up happening, because I mean…the homework did get done. But I’m sure she knocked a point or two off my grade in the end. She was actually quite a good teacher, I was just an obnoxious smart-ass of a student.
I’ve managed to do well in life, miraculously, despite these frequent procrastinations. What I figured out eventually is something that’s true for most people: if I cared about the assignment/work/task, I would put a lot of effort into it, and excel at it. And if I did not care about it, although many people with a better work ethic could still succeed, I did not. And it never really truly bit me. I dodged procrastination landmines all the way to a college degree, somehow. In the end, even under incredible time pressure, I always did the work.
Well, the good news is, once I became interested in sports betting, the procrastination became less frequent. I liked sports betting, liked learning about it (and still do), like thinking about markets as problems or puzzles that can’t fully be solved, but can be thought through constantly. Some of my favorite markets are win totals, probably precisely because I get a lot of time to think about the problem. Side/total markets for most sports are over and done with in a flash, and it’s onto the next day. And I’ve got two kids and I host a radio show for four hours, so sometimes that makes focusing in on a daily problem (or really, 100 daily problems) pretty difficult. But win totals are always kind of there during the summer for me to think about. And so I do…a lot. It’s fun.
What I’d like to start doing here this summer is providing, essentially, homework. But instead of “take crumpled up sheets to the bathroom during class because you’d rather play MarioKart at night than fill them out” homework, this will hopefully be fun homework. A series of prompts to get you thinking about win totals for both the NFL and college football. I have a couple ideas, not fully formed, and I’m gonna just kinda roll them out as I think about them and see how it goes. I’m calling it the “Win Total Workbook.” I’ll give my thoughts on the exercises as well, and talk about what stands out to me, but it’s also an opportunity to get you thinking about what stands out to you, if you’re into that sort of thing. Or you can just read my thoughts on it, I’m good with whatever. You can even print this out and take it to the bathroom.
Today’s exercise is one that I knew I was going to do for a while to start, because it’s really simple.