Blessed Wednesday morning, dear faithful and football fanatics!

The marine layer came in early today and hasn’t left, which means our whole bluff is sitting inside a cloud and I can hear the Pacific perfectly well without being able to see one inch of it. This is the weather we get most mornings out here. It is also, I have decided, a fair description of college football in the middle of August: enormous, close enough to hear, entirely obscured.

Twenty-three days. That is what stands between us and a Saturday that matters.

I have counted them on the chalkboard in our refectory, where Sister Bernadette crossed out the number this morning without a word and then went back to her oatmeal. Forty-odd years in this community, and the closest thing we have to a conscience with a face. She has never once asked me who I like this week. She has also never once missed a kickoff.

If you are new here, and most of you are, you deserve to know what you have signed up for before the season starts and it becomes impractical to leave. So let me tell you who I am, what I do on Saturdays, and why a woman who has taken vows spends her Friday evenings thinking very hard about whether Iowa and Wisconsin will combine for forty points.

I am a Benedictine nun. I live in a cliffside convent in Malibu, California, with thirty-four other sisters, in a 1920s Spanish-revival estate that a silent-film actress built and then deeded to our order in 1961, which is the only reason a community with our finances has an ocean view. The walls are a century old. The ironwork is losing an argument with the salt air. Our bell cracked in the Northridge quake and rings a half-step flat, and nobody has ever found the money to fix it.

I am from Louisiana. I was at LSU not very long ago, and I bleed purple and gold in a way that I understand is medically implausible and theologically unbecoming. I took my vows in my twenties. I have never regretted it for a single day, including the days I have spent staring at a spreadsheet at two in the morning.

And I am a bettor. Mostly a totals bettor. That is my thing, that is where I have an edge. But I will take a side when the number is wrong enough, and I will get to why.

I am aware of how those sentences read.

Let me take the objection seriously, because it deserves better than a joke and because I have heard it from people I love. It goes: gambling is a vice, you have taken vows of poverty and obedience, and there is something unseemly about a woman in a habit handicapping the Big Ten. Some of you think those two things cannot live in one person without one of them being a costume.

I do not think that is stupid. Here is my answer, and I am not going to apologize on my way to it.

Scripture is not squeamish about sport. When Paul wanted to explain the spiritual life to the Corinthians (a city that hosted its own games), he did not reach for a farming metaphor or a fishing metaphor. He reached for athletics, because it was the thing everybody in the room already understood. “Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win.” (1 Corinthians 9:24) The Apostle to the Gentiles was, functionally, a sports guy.

I am not claiming the man kept a running account with some bookmaker down at the harbour in Cenchreae, where he later took ship, or that he had a number on the sprinters. But he had clearly watched the Isthmian Games closely enough to know that most of the field had no business being in it, that the ones who won had been training while everyone else was talking about training, and that the crown they got for it was made of withering celery. He knew who was fit and who was pretending. That is the whole of handicapping, and he used it to explain salvation to a city that would have understood the reference immediately.

And he understood the thing I believe completely: that watching people push themselves to a limit in front of witnesses tells you something true, and that the effort is not diminished by being a game. Twenty-two young men will run into each other for three hours on a Saturday afternoon in front of a hundred thousand people and it will not solve anything. It will not feed anyone. And it will still be one of the most honest things that happens all week.

Now, the money.

The verse everybody misquotes at me is 1 Timothy 6:10, and they always get it wrong. It does not say money is the root of all evils. It says “the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.”

The love. Three words, and dropping them reverses the meaning. That is not a technicality, it is the whole argument. The sin is not the transaction. The sin is what the transaction does to you when you need it, and Paul is not vague about the damage: people pierce themselves.

So I will tell you what I actually believe about this, plainly. Betting money you cannot afford to lose is a sin against your household. Chasing a loss is a sin against your own judgment. Betting because you need the money is not analysis, it is desperation with a spreadsheet on top, and it will eat you. I have watched it eat people. I do not treat that lightly and I never will.

But betting a small and fixed amount of entertainment money on a proposition you have thought carefully about, and then living with the answer? That is a discipline. It has more in common with my other vocation than you would think. Both involve sitting with uncertainty on purpose, doing the work and then releasing the outcome, because the outcome was never yours. Both will humble you on a schedule you do not control.

I keep the sums small. I keep the records honest. I tell you when I lose. Which is going to happen in this newsletter, in public, probably before September is out, and I want you very clear-eyed about that going in.

That is the whole defense. I am not going to make it again.

The follow-up question, almost as common, is whether the people I live with know. They do. Mother Superior has known since before I wrote a word of this. When I brought it to her, braced for a conversation I had rehearsed in the car, she listened to the entire thing, asked two questions about the sums involved, and then delivered a ruling in that flat voice she saves for decisions she made twenty minutes before you finished talking.

She said that the community has always accepted the labor of its members in whatever form it takes, that the Rule of Saint Benedict has a great deal to say about idleness and almost nothing about the point spread, and that she would revisit the matter if it ever cost us anything we could not spare.

Then she asked me to explain what a total was. I did. She listened to the whole thing, nodded once, and said: “So you are betting on the weather.”

I have not improved on that description in three years of trying, and the longer I do this the less I think she was joking.

Weather is a real input and an underpriced one. A wet ball is harder to hold, so coaches stop asking anyone to hold it: you get runs up the middle, short throws, and a punt on fourth and two from midfield because the alternative is a turnover in your own territory. Wind is worse. A twenty-mile-an-hour crosswind in Iowa City takes the deep ball off the menu entirely and turns a forty-three-yard field goal into a coin toss.

And sometimes the wind arrives from nowhere at all. I once saw a Crimson Tide extra point leap sideways by what I would put at thirty feet. A formality. A chip shot. A kick with no earthly business doing anything but going straight through the middle. Still air, clear sky, nothing moving in the flags.

Novice Clare, who is nineteen and from Tuscaloosa and takes these matters personally, made a sound I have not heard from a human being before or since.

So I offered her the only theology that fits the available evidence. Somewhere in the ninth and lowest choir of angels (the plain ones, the entry level, not the cherubim, who sit second from the top of the whole arrangement and are nothing whatever like the fat winged babies the Renaissance painters saddled us with), there is a brand-new angel assigned to the least glamorous square footage in creation, bored past endurance. And he chose that exact moment, on that exact kick, to break wind.

Scripture is emphatic that angels are issued trumpets. Seven of them in Revelation alone, and the last one is meant to raise the dead. What Scripture declines to address is what happens when a junior member of the ninth choir gets bored on a Saturday and produces a comparable note from an entirely different aperture. Judged on tone, duration and sheer contempt, that was no trumpet.

That was a vuvuzela.

Clare said that was blasphemous.

I said the alternative was that the Almighty had personally intervened against the University of Alabama, which seemed to me the considerably less flattering reading, and would she care to pursue it.

She would not.

Now, where was I? Weather.

Mother Superior meant the other kind of weather as well, and she was right about that one too. Every game has a climate. What is at stake, who is frightened, who has nothing left to lose, which coach is coaching for his job in November. You cannot see any of it in a box score. You can feel all of it by Thursday. And it decides how many points get scored far more reliably than either roster does.

Here is where I lose people who assumed I was going to be a picks account.

Most bettors care about the spread. The spread asks: who is better, and by how much? It is a question about people, and people are extremely difficult to predict, particularly when they are nineteen or twenty years old.

The total asks something else entirely: what kind of afternoon is this going to be?

That is a different question, and a much easier one. It is the difference between asking which sister will win an argument at chapter and asking how long the meeting will run. You do not need to know who wins to know it is going to run long. You only need to know who is in the room and how much is at stake, and you can know both of those things on Thursday.

So: my foundational conviction, the one everything else hangs off. When teams have a lot to lose, they play conservatively. Not sometimes. Reliably. A coach with a playoff spot in reach will punt on fourth and three from the opponent’s thirty-eight, will take the field goal, will bleed the clock, and will do all of it while the broadcast crew asks why he is being so timid. He is being timid because timid keeps his job. Fear is the most predictable force in this sport, and fear suppresses scoring.

Which means: big games between good teams stay under more often than the market expects. The market prices two excellent offenses and imagines what they could do. I price two coaches who know what a loss costs them in November, and imagine what they will actually do. Most weeks, most of my card is unders. Some of you will find that boring. It is boring. It also works.

A few more, so you know how I think:

Home field is underpriced early. In September, before anyone has an identity, a hostile stadium in genuine heat is worth more than the number gives it. By November the market has adjusted. By September it has not.

Live home underdogs with nothing to lose will outplay a team that is protecting something. Desperation is a resource. Protection is a liability.

And the one that costs me the most: when the case for both sides is equally good, I pass. Equipoise means no edge. No edge means no bet. I will pass on games I have spent four hours on, and I will tell you I passed and why, and some of you are going to find that maddening. Two to five bets a week. That is the whole card. Quality absolutely trumps quantity.

Now, you will have noticed that some of those are not about totals at all.

I should be straight with you, because you will see it on the card by the second week and I would rather you heard it from me: I bet sides too. Not as often, and not as well. Totals are where I think I am genuinely better than the number. But a live home dog getting four and a half points against a team with everything to protect is sometimes just too good to walk past, and a woman who claims she only ever plays one market is either lying to you or leaving money on the table out of vanity.

The distinction I hold myself to is this: I need a number that is wrong, not a team that I like. “I think they win” is not a bet, it is an opinion with a wager stapled to it. “Four and a half is two points more than this ought to be, and the market is charging for a logo.” That is a bet. If I ever give you the first one dressed up as the second, call me on it.

It is the same idea either way. Fear governs coaching, and a frightened team both scores less and covers less. Two markets, one insight. I am better in one of them because fewer people are standing in it, not because the other is beneath me. You will see both in the ledger, tracked separately, so you can watch which half of that sentence holds up.

Enough theory. Two games already on the board for the opening Saturday, so you can watch me think and decide whether it is worth your inbox.

Northern Illinois at Iowa. Total 45.5, Iowa laying thirty and a half.

Every instinct I have described points one direction. Iowa is the most reliably conservative program in the sport, a team that will punt on second down if the situation seems to call for it, and sometimes it genuinely does. Thirty and a half points means this is over by the third quarter, the starters come out, and the clock runs unmolested to zero. Hammer the under.

Except: look at that number again. 45.5. The market has already done every bit of this reasoning for me. That total is four or five points below where a game with that spread would normally sit, precisely because everyone knows what Iowa is. There is no edge in being the four hundredth person to notice that Iowa plays slow. I will watch this game happily and I will not have a nickel on it.

San José State at USC. Total 59.5, USC laying thirty-six and a half.

Same principle, standing on its head. Thirty-six and a half is a larger spread than the Iowa game. This should be over faster and more decisively. And yet the total is fourteen points higher, because USC scores points and points are memorable and the market is pricing the offense it has watched on television. What it is not pricing, in my view, is the second half: a four-touchdown lead at the break, a backup quarterback taking snaps in the third quarter, and a coaching staff with a conference schedule to survive. Nobody runs up the score in September on a team they will never see again.

The public buys the over on games like this because the favorite is exciting. The mismatch is the very reason the over loses.

Do I have a position? Not yet, and I want to be honest about why: it is August, that number will move, and I have not seen a depth chart I trust. But that is the shape of the thing: the same rule producing a pass on one game and genuine interest in the other, and the difference between them is not the football. It is the price.

Which is the part people misunderstand. I am not trying to tell you what happens on Saturday. I have no idea what happens on Saturday, and neither does anybody who says otherwise with that much confidence. I am looking for the handful of games where the number somebody else set does not match the football I expect to watch.

That is a much smaller claim. It is also the only one I can actually make good on.

I have been doing this for years, and writing about it for one, for a mailing list so lightly read that I could have fit the entire subscriber base in our refectory with chairs left over. Some of you were on it. You have my genuine affection and my sympathy.

So I am not arriving from nowhere. I am arriving from somewhere small enough to round to nowhere, which is close enough that you should treat me as unproven. The ledger starts at nothing and builds in public from here, and you have no earthly reason to trust me yet.

What I can give you instead is the two scars, so you know what kind of bettor you are dealing with.

The first: I had Iowa State at minus three and a half in Ames, and I loved it. I was right about everything. Iowa State won. The crowd mattered. It was a defensive game decided by field goals, exactly as I had said. They won by three.

Half a point. HALF A POINT.

Our bell rings a half-step flat, and I hear it eight times a day, and I have never once stopped thinking about that game when it does. Getting the story right is not the same as getting the number right. That is the most expensive sentence I know.

The second is worse, because I did it to myself. Oregon was giving twenty-eight and a half on the road and every part of my analysis said take it. Talent gap, coaching gap, motivation gap. All of it pointed one direction. And I talked myself out of it, because a road favorite laying four scores felt like a trap, and I have opinions about traps.

Oregon won by sixty-six. Sweet mother of pearl, y’all. SIXTY-NINE TO THREE.

That is not a typo, folks. Overthinking an obvious play is its own kind of sin. Proverbs 16:18 tells us that “Pride goes before disaster, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” I have always assumed that verse was about favorites who believe their own press. It occurs to me now that it applies just as neatly to a handicapper who is too clever to take the obvious side.

I will make both of those mistakes again. I will tell you when I do.

I would be misrepresenting my life if I let you picture me alone in a secluded monastic cell with a laptop. There are thirty-five of us. Our cell signal on this bluff is a rumor, except at one flat boulder on the path where it inexplicably works. We call it the Rock of Impeccable Reception, and there is a sort of pilgrimage to it on Saturdays that Mother Superior has decided not to notice. I have prayed on that rock. I have also refreshed a betting app on it, and I decline to rank those activities.

Our common room holds a donated eighty-five-inch television, given by a producer whose son got sober, which the community treats as its one great indulgence. Our streaming feed runs about twenty seconds behind real time, so we hear the neighbours down the hill react before we see the play. You learn to read a season by the sound of other people’s houses.

Sister Immaculata keeps our three vehicles running, one of which is a 1988 Yugo with over 184,000 miles on it, a junkyard door in a beige that matches nothing, and paint the sun has cooked from red to a shade I can only call ecclesiastical salmon. It looks like something you would leave at a curb. It is also, thanks entirely to her, quicker than it has any business being. It has humiliated a German sedan on the Pacific Coast Highway, in traffic, in front of people.

I think about that car constantly, and not because I enjoy riding in it. Every season has a Yugo. Some team is going to look wrong all August. Wrong roster, wrong coach, wrong conference, wrong everything. And it will be quietly excellent by October, and the market will be the last to find out. Your entire job, and mine, is to find it before the price moves. Everything worth betting looks wrong from the outside. If it looked right, it would already be priced.

Twice a week, most weeks. A Friday piece that looks forward and names what I am actually betting, with a confidence number attached so you can see when I am reaching. A Sunday or Monday piece that grades every one without flinching, including the passes that would have won, because those count too and pretending otherwise is how people lie to themselves.

You will get real numbers, and the reasoning behind every position, so that when I am wrong you can see exactly where the reasoning broke. That is worth more to you than the pick was.

You will not get fourteen plays a week, and you will not get a five-out-of-five confidence pick, because I have never posted one and do not intend to start. You will not get me betting the spread on an LSU game without telling you first that my judgment is compromised, because it is compromised, every single time, and the day I stop saying so out loud is the day you should stop reading.

Only bet what you can afford to lose. Entertainment money stays entertainment money. If this stops being fun, or if you catch yourself needing a result rather than enjoying one, stop. I would rather lose a subscriber than have somebody’s Saturday become a thing they hide. Stewardship does not pause for football season.

Which is most of the reason there is no paywall here, and will not be one. There will be a way to send money if you want to, and it will buy you precisely nothing: no extra picks, no private channel, no early look, no tier. It goes to the convent rather than to me, because I took a vow of poverty and I am not going to start writing around it at this stage. The roof has needed attention since before I arrived.

This is also not my job. My job is prayer, and dishes, and the convent’s bookkeeping, which landed on me the moment somebody noticed I was good with numbers. The newsletter is what I do with the hours that are mine, and I am not putting a card reader in front of it. The people who most need to hear that sentence about entertainment money are, with grim reliability, the people least able to spare a subscription, and a version of this that talks past them would defeat the entire point of writing it. The internet has quite enough walls on it already.

Twenty-three days.

Sister Bernadette caught me at the chalkboard this morning, counting, and I braced for the sober remark she has been perfecting for four decades. She looked at the number, and then at me, and said: “You know it will be over in four months, and you will be like this again in June.”

Then she went back to her oatmeal.

She is right, of course. That is the thing about a season. It is finite by design, which is what makes it worth anything at all. Twelve Saturdays and then some accounting. Young men who will be older when it ends, some of them hurt, most of them fine, a few of them changed. It is not important. I have never once been able to convince myself it is not important.

May all teams play with honor, may all players stay healthy, and may we all remember that these games, however meaningful they feel, are ultimately opportunities to witness young people pursuing excellence, and that the young people are the point, not the number attached to them.

I will see you Friday.

In faith, football, and twenty-three days of poorly concealed impatience,

Sister Mary Catherine, OSB Malibu Convent of the Pacific Waves

P.S. — Sister Margaret, who runs our kitchen and whose detailed knowledge of vice is jokingly described in this house as “purely theoretical,” has already started the season’s first gumbo. It is August. There is no game. When I pointed this out she said the pot needed “seasoning in advance, like anything else worth doing,” and asked me who we like in Week 1. I told her I do not have a position yet. She has decided this means I am hiding something.