When I first opened Qoxhi Picks, a good friend of mine had the master lease on an office building in San Francisco and I rented space from him. We’ll call him Peter, because that was his name, and he was an avid San Francisco 49ers fan which included holding season tickets.

When the 49ers schedule first came out, Peter would sit behind his desk and predict how Bill Walsh and his team were going to do that year. If they were on the road against a good team, like the Dallas Cowboys, he would pause while recognizing the challenge that opponent poised on the road. Still, most often, he opted for a lean towards his team, putting a “W” before moving on to the next contest.

Often, a game that looked a lot easier to win would find Peter marking a “W'' with little thought of losing that game. When the 49ers were meeting a weak team and Peter was marking his schedule he often said, “They’ll win that one easy.”

The one they are going to ‘win easy’, is the game I’m most interested in finding in the right point spread position. Taking the underdog that has clear knowledge that even their best might not be enough to win, is often going to be up against a team confident that what they’ve done in the past is going to mirror today’s result.

Often, those results favor the team that has what John Madden contended was the greatest motivator of all; the fear of failure.

Another group that is on a quest for a ‘sure thing’ every NFL game day is the gambler that needs to win. He will gravitate to the team with the least to worry about while buoyed by the amount of validation he gets all week long from friends and the guy on TV.

Looking to win money with teams that have won it in recent weeks, turns the gambler into a heat-seeking-missile for the team with the least to worry about.

That thinking is also prevalent with the teams themselves. The good ones are confident of a win, and the weaker squads focused like their lives depend on it. Knowing a full effort is required to first avoid a blowout loss and kindle even a faint hope for a win is lethal against an overconfident opponent.

This is where the public really comes in handy.

They siding with the teams seemingly with little to worry about, most often moves the point spread up on the favorite. A point spread move off an opening line affects the point spread result 7% of the time, and on those occasions getting the better line always wins.

My marketing people would like me to claim 70% winners on Top Picks since 1981, but the real number is 68.4%.

It would also be honest to claim we have not lost a September Top Pick in any of the past four years, opening the first four weeks of the past four seasons with one push, 15 wins and no losses.

Last season, the Pittsburgh Steelers were facing an uphill challenge on the road when they opened against the defending American Football Conference Champion Cincinnati Bengals. The point spread opened at 6½ points, and a majority of the betting public took the defending champs at home, pushing the closing line to Cincinnati by seven. The game was highly contested and eventually won by the Steelers, 23-20, but the point spread decision with plus a touchdown on the line was never seriously challenged.

Pittsburgh was the first of our four straight opening day Top Pick wins in 2022. In all, of those 16 games over the first month of an NFL season, 14 have been underdogs and 10 of those teams won their game straight-up. The two favorites picked in the opening four weeks over the past four seasons both won and covered the point spread.

Today, Peter lives in Palm Springs, and I bet when he gets the 49ers 2023 schedule he won’t have any trouble putting a “W” next to the 49ers when they visit the Seattle Seahawks during Week 12 action at Lumen Field.

So, we have that to look forward to.

The Cincinnati Bengals.

Last year, they were in a typical spot to have a very bad year, particularly against the point spread. They had gone from years of last place finishes to the Super Bowl, such a meteoric rise commonly generates an off-year the following season.

It started that way for the Bengals, they went from losing the Super Bowl to the Los Angeles Rams to opening the 2022 season with a home loss to division rival Pittsburgh, 23-20. In second week action, the defending American Football Conference champs got beat in Dallas by a Cowboys team forced to play a second string quarterback following Dak Prescott’s opening week injury.

Then, the Bengals expected decline reversed field like a rocket. The talent and leadership of quarterback Joe Burrow had Zac Taylor’s team win all but two point spread decisions the rest of the season. They also took the Kansas City Chiefs to the brink in defense of their AFC title before surrendering a three point decision, 23-20, at Arrowhead Stadium.

How did they do that?

How did they go from losing to a struggling Steelers team on their home field, and falling to the Cowboys as a road favorite, before catching fire in a season that should have continued down the rocky road shown the first two weeks?

More importantly, how will the Bengals respond this year after winning when they shouldn’t have last year?

I’m telling you, I’ve got empirical evidence to support a colossal collapse or Super Bowl win.

Take your pick.

Nothing in the middle for the Bengals in 2023, they either win it all or drop like a rock.

Here are the possible scenarios that could play out. The winning season last year, despite being caught in a traditional down season, only adds more credence for a fall in 2023.

Conversely, the Bengals just might be so good that they can come off another year where a Super Bowl title has eluded them and this time grab the golden ring.

It’s early, but as of now, I think the Bengals win it all with a Super Bowl LVIII triumph at Allegiant Stadium, home of the Las Vegas Raiders.

The NCAA Basketball Tournament is the best sporting event every year.

The Super Bowl is great, the World Series seemed more important when I was a kid, and the NBA playoffs can generate a lot of excitement. Yet, the three weeks of college basketball leading up to the National Championship Game, this year staged in Houston on April 3, is glorious from the beginning. Every team that starts play on Thursday and Friday, once the field has been thinned to 64 teams, has a chance to capture the top prize.

In college football, the possibility of a national champion is reduced to four before the nearly 100 teams participate in their postseason bowl games. Football can’t really do it any other way, and assuring head-to-head competition for the National Championship adopted in recent years is a step forward.

In all likelihood, one of the high seed teams in this year’s tournament will win it all, but we have already had two top seeds eliminated this year. Only once in the past twenty seasons have all four teams seeded first in their region advanced to the Sweet 16.

On Friday, the Purdue Boilermakers became only the second top seed to lose their opening round game when they fell to upset bound Farleigh Dickinson. Five years ago, the University of Maryland, at Baltimore County, upset the Virginia Cavaliers in the first ever number one seed to fall to a 16.

Virginia bounced off that loss in 2018 with a National Championship in 2019. That would be the kind of response the Boilermakers will be looking for following their stunning defeat.

This year, the Fairleigh Dickinson Knights not only became the second 16th seed to win their opening game, they also gave nationally ranked Florida Atlantic all they could handle in their second round game. The Knights' dreams finally ended in a single digit loss to the talented Owls, 78-70.

People who have enjoyed our football picks on this site want to know if we do basketball?

Last week, two games we did select were observably dominate physically over their opponents, something we only came to know after the games started. The Miami Hurricanes clearly had the advantage Charles Barkley described as “kids against adults” while observing the same attributes with San Diego State versus overmatched Furman.

The National Football League is what we do, and while the numbers I weigh decisively pointed to Miami over Drake and San Diego State over Furman, I didn’t realize their physical advantage until I saw the games. In the NFL, I would not be surprised by how the team strengths matchup while owning both a clear understanding of team strengths and the line moves and wagering patterns that illuminate winning point spread plays.

Picking point spread sides purely by the numbers generates solid returns, but without a true appreciation of team strengths and weaknesses those presumed best selections can’t be delivered with the same level of maximum confidence.

Full season football clients get our NCAA and NBA Playoffs picks by text, it is an added benefit that isn’t sold separately because we do football first. If we had a bad run in basketball, like we did two years ago, the worst thing would be to lose football subscribers based on basketball plays.

Our wagering recommendation for the NCAA Basketball Tournament is equal amounts on both the first half score and final result. Over the first four days of this year’s action Qoxhi releases were 16-9 on final results, a solid 64% winning margin.

The first half results did not fare nearly as well, even the aforementioned game between Miami and their superiority over Drake didn’t have the first half result match the final winning result. In all, the first half record of 10-12-3 reduced a nearly 10% profit margin on opening account balances to a 6.1% profit margin.

Wagering on the first half in college basketball, and quarters in football, adds risk to a solid investment that can either enhance profits or reduce the bottom line. The first two years the Triple Play NFL plan was available online, it showed winning margins of 36% in 2019 and 39% the following season. Two years ago, the Triple Play strategy suffered a losing record, while rebounding in 2022 with their best year, returning a 75% profit margin over the entire 18 week regular season.

Winning final selections statistically more often wins the first half result too. The fact that the first half results in the opening week of NCAA Basketball Tournament play were negative could be viewed as an anomaly, and that would commonly be followed by a robust winning run.

If you want the NCAA Tournament for the remaining schedule, and all the NBA Playoff selections texted to you, sign up for the Qoxhi football season now.