Sleepers, Upsets and Odds to Win it All

Let's first get the obvious stuff out of the way first. My Final Four - UNC, Georgetown, Texas and UCLA. I think UNC is going to win the NC over UCLA.

Sleepers for the Sweet Sixteen:
#11 seed St. Joe's
St. Joe's beat Xavier twice in the past two weeks. They play very good defense and they are a good road team. Meanwhile, Oklahoma is limping into the tournament. While they have a good frontcourt, their backcourt struggles -- and guard play is key in the tourney. In the second round, St Joe's will likely meet Louisville which is a very good team. However, Louisville has struggled against defensive minded teams losing its last two to Pitt and GTown. Additionally, Louisville has the 4th lowest FT% at 65%, while St. Joe's shoots 75% from the charity stripe.

#5 seed Notre Dame (not a huge upset, but they should beat #4 Wash St in Rd 2)
I really like Notre Dame's inside/outside game with Harangody and McAlarney. They are a very quiet 24-7 in the extremely tough Big East. While Washington St was solid against the weaker teams in the Pac 10. They are 0-5 against UCLA and Stanford and they lost twice to an average Arizona team. Just a gut feel here but I think Notre Dame is the better team.

Now for some more fun stuff. All of these lines and odds come from BetUS.com and obvious are subject to change from the time of writing this. BetUS is also offering a 50% deposit bonus if you join now, click here.

First off lets look at some of the odds to win it all (shown under the Future/props section)

UNC 4:1
UCLA 4:1

Both of these seem like pretty good values to me. Often favorites are no more than 3:1, but because so many teams are capable of winning it all the odds are a bit better this year. In reality, UNC and UCLA seem heads and shoulders above the other top teams that I like these odds.

Duke 14:1
GTown 16:1

Both of these seem like real interesting speculations in my mind. I really think either of these teams could win it all. While Kansas, Memphis and Tennessee all have major flaws that I would not want to wager a futures bet on, I think Duke and GTown are a legitimate speculation that may payoff.

Now for some straight line and over/under picks. Again these lines are based on the lines at BetUS.com

Xavier over Georgia giving 8.5 points
Kudos to Georgia getting in and playing their hearts out over 4 days. However, we have seen these play-in conference tourney runs lead to complete letdowns in the tourney (remember Syracuse and McNamara a couple years ago). While they did have a nice run, I don't think Georgia is a real good team and yet they are meeting a very good Xavier team. I would give the 8.5 points here and grab Xavier for a big win.

St. Joe's getting 1 against Oklahoma
I have already said that I really like St. Joe's to reach the Sweet Sixteen and I definitely look for them to win this first round. See my analysis above for why I like them.

Purdue over Baylor giving 3 points
I know everyone says the Big 10 is down but I have seen Purdue a couple times this year and they are a very talented team. They were the best 3 point shooting team in the Big 10 and hit 11 per game. They also play very hard-nosed defense and will slow Baylor's uptempo pace (so I also like the under 140 in this one too). I think the early exit from the B10 Tourney will be a motivating factor and they will be ready to play.

Tournament Success by Conference

We hear so much talk about the strongest basketball conferences each year from the talking heads that I thought I would actually take a numerical look at the past 10 and 25 year periods. While there are many ways to measure success, the one clear objective measure that everyone agrees on is success in the NCAA tournament. I chose to measure the number of teams each conference put into the Final Four over the period of time in question.

[edit 10-21-07 - Reader poll results for 3rd best conference voting; 43% Big East, 32% SEC, 21% PAC-10 and 2% Big 12.]

Note: Several Final Four teams have jumped from one conference to another but in order to keep the statistics as accurate to the conferences success for that year, I have credited the conference for which that team played in the year in question.

First the facts -- here are the number of final four teams by conference for the period indicated.

Past 10 Years (1998 - 2007):
ACC 9
Big10 9
Big12 5
SEC 5
BigEast 4
Pac10 4
CUSA 1
Horizon 1
MtnWst 1
Atl10 0
Other 1
Total 40

Past 25 Years (1983 - 2007)
ACC 23
Big10 16
SEC 16
BigEast 12
Big12 11
Pac10 8
CUSA 7
MtnWst 4
Horizon 1
Atl10 1
Other 1
Total 100

Now the analysis...
Conference Ranks in order:

ACC
News flash, the ACC is the best and most consistently good basketball conference. No surprise there. However, one statistic did jump out at me from the analysis; during the 25 year period, the ACC only whiffed on the FF in 6 years! Basically, you can count on at least one ACC team in most FFs. In 4 of the 25 years, the ACC put half the teams in the FF. But really this is a story of two schools; a total of 17 of the 23 FF appearances from the ACC were made by Duke and North Carolina. That is quite a testament to those two schools and partly explains the Dickie V bias for schools from the Tobacco state.

Big Ten
The Big Ten is clearly the second best basketball conference during the periods as they were tied with the ACC during the past 10 years and tied for second with the SEC during the past 25 years. They were not as consistent as the ACC, missing in 14 of the 25 years, however they made up for it in density. In 5 of the 11 years that they put a team in the FF, they also put a second team in. The Big Ten's representation was balanced from a number of schools with the Spartans having the most appearances at 4.

SEC
During the past 25 years, the SEC was tied with the Big Ten in FF appearances, but surprisingly in the past 10 years they had fallen off. That is until the past two years when they accounted for 3 of the 8 FF teams and Florida's back to back championships. Clearly things are looking up again in the SEC. Kentucky has been the most frequent dancer with 5 FF appearances in the past 25 years.

Big East
The next two are very close between the Big East and the Big 12, while the numbers are almost identical I have to give the slight edge to the Big East. They had one more appearance over the 25 year period but more importantly they had balanced appearances (3 each from Gtown and Syracuse, 2 from Uconn and then 3 other teams made it), whereas the Big 12 had 5 of its 11 total appearances made by Kansas. During the 25 year period, the Big East is also the only conference that produced 3 of the FF in one year, 1985.

Big 12
As previously mentioned, Kansas has been the key contributor to the FF with 5 of 11 appearances, or 45%, during the 25 year period. In 3 of the 8 years that they put teams into the FF, they put 2 teams in including back to back double team appearances in 2002 and 2003.

Pac 10
The Pac 10 was next with 8 total appearances over the 25 year period. UCLA and Arizona were the real basketball powers from the Pac 10 representing 7 of the 8 appearances over the 25 year period. Stanford had the other lone appearance from the Pac 10.


Conference USA
Conference USA had a dominant period during the mid-1980s when 5 of their 7 total FF appearances occured. At the time Houston, Memphis and Louisville were all strong teams. Since that time only Cincinnati in 1992 and Louisville in 2005 had made it back to the FF. This conference has been decimated with the departures to the Big East and only Memphis looks like a serious contender to get back to the FF anytime soon.