NCAA Conference Tournament Considerations

By Matty O’Shea
Pregame.com Senior Editor

March is upon us, which means the betting madness surrounding college hoops is finally here.  NCAA Tournament office pools will have to wait until next week though.  Instead, warm up for the Big Dance by watching how the lines will be adjusted to accommodate much heavier public action, starting with this week’s conference tournaments.

I talked with a number of offshore bookmakers over the last few days, and each explained that the conference tournaments are the start of the public really getting involved, which inevitably means more money on the favorites.  In anticipation of the public action, bookmakers typically inflate the line on the favorites – creating juicy dog numbers for players looking for value.

It’s important to keep in mind that any team, no matter how disappointing its regular season, can gain an automatic Big Dance bid with a conference tournament championship – so the motivation of the cellar dwellers should be strong.

The fate of bubble teams will be decided this week. The difference between the NCAAs and NIT is like the difference between Jessica and Ashlee Simpson.  A few wins and a bubble teams is in – an opening round loss and hello NIT road game in front of 1500 fans. (At the end of this article is an updated list of bubble teams as projected by ESPN)

Meanwhile, other big chalk plays like top-ranked Illinois and second-ranked North Carolina don’t have much to gain at this point since they likely have already sown up No. 1 seeds in the NCAA tourney.  However, bookmakers said the likelihood that the Illini and Tar Heels are virtual locks to get No. 1’s no matter what they do in their conference tournaments won’t change the way they make the lines since they will still be very popular with the public regardless.  How motivated Illinois will be now to win the Big Ten tourney title after suffering its first loss on Sunday to Ohio State will be especially interesting to speculate upon.

Motivation is definitely a key factor since some coaches simply don’t put as much emphasis on conference tournaments in hopes of being fresh going into the NCAAs.  Two coaches who don’t seem to believe in going all out to win their conference tournaments include Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim and Arizona’s Lute Olson.

Boeheim’s Orange squads have not won the Big East Tournament since 1992 and have suffered opening-round losses five times over that stretch.  However, Syracuse has been a mainstay in the NCAAs, reaching the Sweet 16 in three of the team’s last four trips to the tourney and winning the 2003 national title.  The Orange have gone 1-3 ATS in their last three Big East tournaments compared to 7-2 in their past two trips to the NCAA tourney. 

Olson and former Stanford coach Mike Montgomery were the only two Pac-10 coaches to vote against resurrecting the conference tournament in 2002.  Olson’s Wildcats won it that year but were bounced in the opening round as the top seed the following year and lost in the semifinals in 2004, going 0-3 ATS.

Something else to keep a close eye on is how well a team responds when a key player is injured.  Just last year, Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun put eventual Final Four Most Outstanding Player Emeka Okafor’s health ahead of his goal of winning the Big East Tournament by keeping his star out of action until the championship game.  In Okafor’s absence, guard Ben Gordon stepped up and found his shooting touch, which proved to be critical to UConn’s success down the stretch en route to winning the national championship. 

Calhoun’s move obviously paid off, as a rested Okafor not only teamed with Gordon to help lead the Huskies to a victory in his return during the Big East tourney title game but also allowed Okafor to regain his dominant form.  It’s character points like these that separate the contenders from the pretenders at this point and ended up vaulting UConn to the top of the college basketball world a year ago.  We’ll take note of which teams might be up to the task this year in next week’s NCAA Tournament outlook.

Reading the right stuff pays! – Matty O’Shea, pregame.com

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