Vegas line setters are the ones who know the most about the analytics, know the most about matchups, know the most about trends and injury impact. They overreact the *least* to small sample sizes. They understand the most how variance impacts the sports, and how wins and losses are not necessarily indicative of a team's actual strength of performance on the whole. The best sports podcasts on the whole tend to be the ones who don't predict heads up wins and losses, but instead predict performance against the spread. I find those host far more nuanced conversation than the ones that spend thirty minutes on what LaVar Ball said this week or if LeBron is the GOAT or not.

As an example, it drives me *crazy* when you see the 20th ranked team play the 12th ranked team at home, be a 3-4 point favorite, win the game, and hear everyone call it an "upset" afterward solely based on rankings-- which are set completely arbitrarily by a set of sports journalists who designate their rankings based on whatever personal preferences they have, some of which are borderline insane. It genuinely hurts a casual fan's ability to understand the game.

If more casual sports fans could understand the value of watching the game on a deeper level than "this team is ranked higher, so they should win," or "this guy is the star, so he needs to carry his team to victory, otherwise he's a loser," then the discourse would be a thousand times better. Any gambling-related shenanigans that go down will go down irrespective of gambling's legality.

(I also realize the Value Of Discourse is totally subjective, and many people would rather listen to the LaVar Ball/is Bron the GOAT stuff than listen to a nerdy, nuanced breakdown of game matchups. So this is completely just my own personal pet peeves pouring out here, lol.)

My movies: http://russellhainline.com
My movie reviews: https://letterboxd.com/RussellHFilm/
My beer TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thebeertravelguide